I don’t think it’s hard to notice that life has its fair share of pain and difficulty. Turn on the news for five minutes and you can see that people are suffering everywhere—whether it be through violence, disaster, aging, illness, mental anguish, or being separated from loved ones. Yet our suffering also shows up in daily life in more ordinary ways—not wanting to go to work, getting frustrated with a loved one, stressing out about how to pay the bills, bumping into someone you don’t want to see. At least once a day, we experience—even if only slightly—the vulnerability and uneasiness of being alive. Even during pleasurable times, there is a slight twinge of anxiety because deep down we know it will not last. 

When reading Buddhist literature, you may stumble across the first noble truth being translated as “the truth of dukkha,” or that “life is suffering.” Another way to translate the first noble truth is to say that “life is unsatisfactory.” It’s not that there isn’t any pleasure at all in our lives, but that nothing in our experience can be permanently satisfying, for the simple reason that it cannot last. When using the word “unsatisfactory” as the definition of dukkha instead of “suffering,” it seems to make more sense that all life is dukkha. But there are still more ways to understand this truth.

Dukkha is a complicated subject matter, and can be translated and understood in many different ways. Ajahn Sumehdo defines it like this: “there is suffering.” It’s basically saying that, yes, at some point in this life, there will be suffering. As author Mark Epstein once wrote, life can often be “hard to face.” This shifts us away from the idea that all of life is suffering and points us directly to the fact that life will inevitably have its sorrows, traumas, pains, and difficulties. This understanding of the first noble truth seems a little more inviting and to be more in line with the Buddha’s goal of easing suffering. If we understand pain as a part of life and know that things may get quite challenging at times, then we will have less resistance to those challenges and can perhaps even find skillful ways of working with them. If we aren’t running away from or fighting with the painful aspects of ourselves or our lives, we can instead learn to practice being at ease with them and, more importantly, we can learn how not to make things worse.

The most ancient meaning of the original Pali word refers to a broken axle of an oxcart. In other words, life will surely be a bumpy ride. When the Buddha taught dukkha, he expressed it as encompassing a myriad of phenomena: 

“Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha.” – SN 56.11

The above passage from the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is basically explaining every aspect of our lives; everything we will experience in life is present in this definition. And yet, the Buddha wasn’t trying to be pessimistic but rather was offering a realistic understanding, or road map, of what to expect. He passed on a theoretical understanding so that we could see life as it really is. This is meant to help us reframe our experience of our difficulties and give us an alternative way to navigate through our lives. Rather than seeing dukkha as some metaphysical truth that must be conquered, we can instead shift the way we view it, making it a lifelong practice of softening and letting go. After all, Buddha didn’t have some fancy technique to kill off Mara forever, but instead allowed his delusions to naturally fall away by seeing them clearly and through a peaceful presence. 

But why start with suffering? Why did the Buddha begin his teachings with the suffering of life? I personally feel he did this to help us reconcile our lives with how things truly are. In order to let go of suffering, first, we must admit it into our consciousness. If we are deluded about how things are, suffering will surely follow. How can we expect to see things clearly if we’re constantly shaking them up through struggle and resistance? How can we be at ease if we are always thinking that something’s wrong or missing?

Shared Dukkha

The question is not how to solve the problem of suffering, but how to receive it differently. Once we understand that every life has its share of suffering, dissatisfaction, and sorrow, we aren’t so shocked when we experience it, and we learn to stay with it rather than run away from it with unwholesome or unskillful habitual reactions, which inevitably make things worse. With practice, we can learn to meet our difficulties with an equanimous mindset. Paradoxically, once we stop fighting our suffering, there is a deep sense of ease, a profound okay-ness with things exactly as they are. 

Deeply contemplating and understanding the truth of suffering also allows us to experience a tender space within ourselves, a vulnerable rawness we habitually run away from. Typically, the armor goes up and our hearts become hardened. But the way the Buddha taught goes against our habitual ways of escaping our difficulties, and instead teaches us how we can relax and open to our suffering in a new way that not only leads to peace but also helps us cultivate compassion. 

Any suffering we experience is shared suffering. In other words, there is always someone else out there who shares the same suffering we are experiencing. We are never alone in our dukkha. When we experience any form of discomfort or pain in our lives, we can open up to it, wishing that all beings experiencing this suffering (including us) be free from it. In this way, we take something we normally would run away from or have aversion to and use it as fertilizer to cultivate wholesome states of mind. 

A great way to cultivate compassion with the suffering in your life is by taking one hand to your heart and fully feeling your pain. Once you come into the felt sense of it, you can acknowledge, without judgment, your struggles with this difficult time in your life. For example, if you are experiencing pain from an illness, such as cancer, you could bring your hand to your heart, fully feel your suffering, and say, “I am struggling with the pain from this illness.” This connects you with the truth of your suffering and also acknowledges and honors it in a direct, judgment-free way. The next step is to wish all beings experiencing similar suffering freedom from it. This may look something like this, “may all beings experiencing the pain and struggles of cancer be free from it.” With this wish, you are not only embracing your pain but also embracing the pain and suffering of the world. Approaching your suffering in this way connects you with your vulnerability, allowing your heart to stay open, rather than letting life’s difficulties harden it into stone. It also prevents you from following your comfortable and habitual misguided roads to happiness, which usually are ways to simply try to escape the initial pain and discomfort.

Ultimately, all of our lives will include suffering and dissatisfaction, and the first noble truth reminds us of this sobering reality. We are all in this together, and whether we like it or not, none of us can escape from aging, sickness, and death. Rather than allowing these difficult times to make us bitter and fearful, the Buddha offered a new way: face the suffering, experience and understand it fully, and allow it to come and go as it will with ease and compassion—it’s simply the movement of life. With a spacious mind and a kind heart, you can learn that you don’t need to throw away your difficulties, but through changing your relationship with them, you can transform and experience them in a profoundly different way. 

The Three Categories of Dukkha

It’s clear that life can cause uneasiness and difficulty in many ways, but the Buddha broke it down into three categories:

• The dukkha of dukkha
• The dukkha of change
• The dukkha of conditioned existence

As we previously explored, dukkha can be understood as the natural pains and sorrows coming from birth, aging, sickness, and death. But what could the Buddha have meant by the dukkha of dukkha? This, I believe, is how we begin understanding where our practice takes place. There is the truth of dukkha, but there is also something placed on top of how things already are. The dukkha of dukkha then would be the extra layer of mental anguish we add to the inevitable suffering in our lives. 

A teaching the Buddha offered to explain this was the story of the two arrows. He explained how if one were to be shot with an arrow, it would be quite painful, and if that person were to get shot again in the same spot, it would be even more excruciating. The first arrow is the inevitable discomforts and difficulties that present themselves in our lives that aren’t in our control—the first level of dukkha—but the second one is our reaction to the first, and this is something we can learn to see clearly and let go of, hence reducing or eradicating completely the second level of dukkha. 

The second category of dukkha is the dukkha of change, which is the anxiety and reactivity produced by the impermanent nature of our pleasant experiences. Nothing in the entire universe is ever static; rather, all things are incessantly changing, leaving us desperately seeking and grasping for solid ground to stand on. We fear this underlying groundlessness, and rather than learning how to make friends with it, we instead create a variety of hopeless security blankets we think will bring us ease. These, of course, make us even more neurotic, and the cycle of suffering continues on and on.  

Once we are able to understand and embrace the fact that all things in life are fleeting, we can learn how to relax into the flow of our lives. In knowing experientially and deeply that change is the only unchanging promise life has to offer, we can begin the process of cooling down the flare-ups of conditioned reactivity toward it. With practice, we can learn to step out of the false security blankets and meet the many changes of our ever-flowing lives with curiosity, openness, and ease.

The last of the three categories of dukkha is the dukkha of conditioned existence. When looking at this form of dukkha, I find it helpful to keep the definition of dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness.” Basically, this type of dukkha is pointing toward the groundlessness and uncertainty of our situation. Every condition is dependent upon causes, which, not only are constantly in flux but are also dependent on their own set of changing conditions to exist. Everything always depends on conditions being a certain way, and since those conditions are constantly shifting, there is always a sense of uneasiness or dissatisfaction. In other words, life itself is very uncertain, which can leave us with a persistent feeling of existential anxiety or anguish. Take the fragility of human life, for example. There are many conditions necessary for you to be reading the words found in this article. If there weren’t trees, atmosphere, water, food, sunlight, etc., you wouldn’t even be here. All that we depend on to exist also depends on other conditions. Trees need water, sunlight, fertile soil, and so forth. If one thing changes, it will affect everything else. So we suffer because we are unable to be at ease with the fact that we will never get a solid footing in our ever-changing situation. 

I’ve also heard the dukkha of conditioned existence explained as the suffering of constant maintenance. We need to constantly nourish ourselves to stay alive. Moment by moment, we need to breathe in the air around us. We must feed ourselves daily and make sure we are properly hydrated. If we choose not to maintain one of these basic needs, we will die. This constant need to maintain ourselves every day can be experienced as an underlying uneasiness present in our lives. 

Embracing Dukkha

Together, the three forms of dukkha shape the basis of our practice. As we begin to recognize how things really are and how this second layer of dukkha arises in response to the first, we can start the difficult journey of relaxing into the inevitable discomforts of our lives while learning to let go of our reactivity. 

It’s clear to see that dukkha is in fact a truth in our lives. It’s a mark of existence. Things are unstable and impermanent, and because of this they are ultimately unsatisfactory, and if misunderstood, can cause a lot of unnecessary distress. In order to begin embracing dukkha, we must first contemplate its existence. We have to realize for ourselves that, yes, suffering does indeed exist in this world and all of us will surely experience it. More importantly, we must understand that there is no way to avoid it. Difficulty, discomfort, pain, and sorrow all come with the territory of being human. 

Through deep reflection, we start spending less time and energy running away from our suffering and begin learning new ways to relate to it. Similar to the Buddha, we can learn to stop trying to escape the sobering truths of life, and instead be willing to experience them fully, looking at them deeply through and through. Perhaps, as we slowly begin training ourselves to be accustomed to how things actually are, we will grow in wisdom, compassion, and ease. Once we stop resisting our lives, we can find wiser and more skillful ways of experiencing them.

The post Understanding Dukkha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the Indo-Tibetan textual tradition, the four seals (Skt. caturmudrā, T. phyag rgya bzhi), or dom shyi in the Tibetan oral tradition, are the four necessary characteristics of a view or teaching to mark or certify it as Buddhist. These seals mark our views as Buddhist, as opposed to taking refuge in the three jewels, which makes us Buddhist through precepts. Tibetan monastics memorize the four seals in their teenage years in a short formula:

All compounded things are impermanent.

All contaminated things are dukkha (unsatisfactory).

All phenomena are empty and selfless.

Nirvana is true peace.

Several sources attributed to the Buddha, including The Questions of the Nāga King Sāgara (Sagara­naga­raja­pariprccha), mention these four statements. They are closely related to the three marks of existence—impermanence, dukkha, and nonself—that play a quintessential role in the Pali and the Sanskrit traditions of insight meditation. Although the last of the four gives hope for an eventual end to suffering, we must initially grapple with the first three seals.

The Tibetan word for a follower of Buddhism—nangpa—means “insider” and implies that we only truly live in the fold of the Buddhist worldview when these four seals start to permeate our perception and become its natural element. The real challenge is not understanding the four seals conceptually but applying them to our existence, with all our multifaceted identities, challenges, dramas, dreams, and aspirations. We should measure the four seals against the fabric of our daily life to see with greater clarity all the individual threads and knots that make up our lives and then let them dissolve in an ocean of spacious, liberated awareness. Easier said than done, of course.

Looking deeply into our existence will not be unsympathetic toward our conventional reality, where we see ourselves as beings of different backgrounds, genders, cultures, sexualities, and generations. It was this duality of relative identities and universal truths that I, as a queer practitioner and ex-monastic, experienced quite powerfully when interpreting teachings on the four seals given by one of my primary mentors, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. Though he spoke about the four seals in a general way, his talk left room for profound personal reflection on how the roles and labels I have serve as an illustration for the material. In our conventional identities, we see the first three seals with greater precision.With that understanding, we then use the fourth one to see the flip side, sometimes described as the indivisible union of emptiness and luminosity that transcends conventions yet remains inseparable from them.

The First Seal: All Compounded Things Are Impermanent

Hearing that impermanence pervades all compounded things is challenging, not because it’s untrue but because it is true. If the world has cut us deeply with rejection—like it so often does with queer individuals—how can we accept that even our few loving connections will be taken away? How can we accept the inevitable separation from the body we’ve used to find those connections and with which we’ve worked so hard to make peace? We viscerally shy away from knowing that every relationship, even our life, will end.

Despite the resistance, we know that the threads holding the pieces of our lives together will inevitably snap, something new will form, and then again be replaced with another configuration of matter, energy, and awareness. It’s not easy to feel and know this without some sense of grief, but contemplating impermanence is supposed to bring about a level of sadness—a disappointment in our hungry grasping at permanence, in our inability to be like Queen Elsa in Frozen and simply “let it go.”  

I can only tolerate impermanence because I deliberately and continually remind myself of the naturalness of change. Like the changing of the season, my own life will endlessly go through cycles of change. I can find solace in the naturalness of it all and keep rolling along, however clumsily. Although this may seem like a simplistic understanding of the first seal, it is, perhaps, “good enough,” as Lama Thubten Yeshe used to say. Good enough to keep my vulnerable queer heart afloat: not yet radiantly enlightened, but certainly still alive.

The Second Seal: All Contaminated Things Are Dukkha 

Why does being in the world cut so deep? Why do our interactions with others often continue to slice our hearts like a sharp razor, even when we earnestly try to do our best? Our minds and the minds of all sentient beings are contaminated by primordial ignorance (avidya) and therefore accompanied by multiple types of dukkha or unsatisfactoriness. 

This contamination is not about violating the decrees of a higher authority or about systems of social oppression, which ultimately also stem from the fundamental polluting agent of ignorance. This ignorance—that which contaminates us—is our shared tendency to reify: to draw a thick line around ourselves and other phenomena, or subject and object. Living under the influence of this habit, we all construct thick walls and then harm each other and ourselves in endless cycles of attachment and aversion. 

The Third Seal: All Phenomena Are Empty and Selfless

Our attempt to overcome this contamination brings us to the third seal, which invites us to recognize all phenomena’s selfless and empty nature: the lack of independent existence. Since this truth goes strongly against our habituated perceptions, people often misunderstand this truth, which leads to additional harm for marginalized communities, adding insult to injury. It is too easy to say, “Everything is empty, so your queerness (race, gender, immigrant status, traumatic past) doesn’t matter.” Even though such a comment (perhaps well-meaning) tries, unskillfully, to point out the emptiness and grasping, it’s hurtful in its dismissiveness, reveals more about the speaker’s unchecked privilege, and in attempting to avoid the extreme of grasping, can also fall into the opposite extreme of nihilism.

Indeed, we are not merely our marginalized identities—but acknowledging those identities is essential, both in terms of our dukkha and as tools we can use to serve others. When doing Buddhist visualization practices—so beloved in the Indo-Tibetan lineage, where they form an integral part of Vajrayana practice—we keep the rules of the meditation intact: each Buddha figure appears in its color, with the correct number of arms, faces, and eyes. Arya Tara’s green form is visualized as green, and Medicine Buddha is imagined as radiantly sapphire-blue, without qualms about their unusual appearances or claims that the form is irrelevant. Things do not collapse into utter nihilistic chaos, even as they arise against the background of emptiness. So, why would our conventional roles no longer matter in the relational realm? I have repeatedly heard from my teachers of Madhyamaka philosophy that emptiness does not mean nothing matters. Since everything is empty, everything matters. Embodying the perfection of wisdom on the bodhisattva path by finding the balance between the relative and ultimate —between “I am definitely and defiantly queer” and “The empty self is not inherently queer”—requires a lifetime, or multiple lifetimes, to fully master.

The Fourth Seal: Nirvana is True Peace

Fully embodying the wisdom of knowing emptiness is nirvana. However, for many of us, the possibility of nirvana is merely a working hypothesis and something to be gradually tested through practice. So, how does the fourth seal provide peace right now? Is nirvana simply a promise for the distant future, like one day going to Heaven or one of the Buddhist pure lands?

Some Western teachers insist that all we have available are discrete moments of insight, which can never remove our underlying fallibility, no matter how meaningful. While the Indo-Tibetan tradition (or “Nalanda tradition,” as the Dalai Lama prefers to call it) that I’ve been trained in does not disagree with the persistent nature of our fallible traits, it does envision a complete potential transformation that transcends this life, even if it takes numerous lifetimes to achieve. Knowing which of these interpretations is correct requires carefully examining our reductionist and colonial conditioning, assessing our assumptions about the nature of consciousness, and, perhaps, a few encounters with realized practitioners of the highest caliber.

While all of that is underway, a beautiful element of the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) and Great Seal (Mahamudra) traditions is that they readily offer meaningful glimpses into our ultimate radiant nature. Gained through qualified guidance, careful preparation, and practice, these glimpses aren’t the same as full realization or nirvana but still provide essential insights. Je Tsultrim Zangpo, from the Dzogchen lineage, compares these insights into our pristine awareness to rays of light. Following the ray to its source, we arrive at the sun of complete freedom and experience the fourth seal in its full form.

Tenderness is an inseparable quality of our true nature.

This journey to the fourth seal is not only about exploring the qualities of awareness—at least not emotionally, since our hearts might hunger for more—but also about how tenderness is an inseparable quality of our true nature. The Dzogchen tradition teaches that our ultimate nature has three primary qualities: emptiness, luminous cognizance, and all-pervading spontaneous compassion. 

My limited conceptual understanding of spontaneous compassion (stemming from both emptiness and luminosity) had a powerful transformative effect on my practice and my way of being in this world. A few years into my decade-long monastic training, one of my primary teachers reminded me of the connection between the more effortful practices of the four immeasurables (brahmaviharah)—love, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—and the spontaneous, effortless warmth of our pristine nature. That reminder (less than a sentence in a short email) made me think: how can I work towards greater levels of trust towards this loving nature, which, in my case, manifests through the lens of my queer identity and has perhaps been obscured by all the heartbreak experienced so far? This question inevitably brings me back to the practical application of the four seals—a way of holding my mindfulness on them so they can transform my experience.

The four seals interpenetrate each other in our lives and can become a powerful emotional support system if we let them. For that, an excellent place to start is the fourth one: in seeking peace, let’s start with the promise of peace (nirvana). Let’s imagine that our ultimate nature is, as Dzogchen teaches, empty of inherent existence, radiantly cognizant, and boundlessly compassionate. When can that boundless compassion manifest and be strengthened? When we face change (first seal) and the knots of our contaminants—our afflictions—make us hurt ourselves and others (second seal). What helps us undo those knots? Deeper and deeper levels of knowing that things are not inherently existent. Understanding that things are, in the words of Suzuki Roshi, “not always so” can help us face life’s challenges with more compassion and respond in more wholesome ways.

Systems of oppression, acts of violence, the roughness of the fabric of existence, and even change itself can leave us aching, but by reflecting on the four seals, we can see what lies at the root of both pain and the tendency to create pain. Understanding the source of our suffering, expressed in the second seal, we seek the medicine of emptiness and find peace by experiencing our true nature.

Developing a trusting confidence in our true nature—our basic goodness—has been emphasized by many notable Buddhist teachers whom I’ve had the fortune to meet. This confidence does not come through simply telling yourself that “I’m a radiant magical being” or being reminded by others. It unfolds when we gradually realize the first three seals so that all of us—queer or not—can gracefully accept change, compassionately deal with our afflictions, and constantly remain aware that all things are radiantly empty. To whatever degree these four qualities seal the fabric of my life, I feel that my practice and existence—as an individual and a part of my communities—have been meaningful.

⧫

Watch a guided meditation from Michael Lobsang Tenpa on the second of the four seals below. 

The post Sealing Our Queer Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Dependent origination, writes Leigh Brasington in Dependent Origination and Emptiness, was the Buddha’s best attempt to describe what happened on the night of his enlightenment. But the great teacher’s list of twelve links, which the British scholar Caroline Rhys Davids called a “mysterious old rune,” can be confounding, to say the least.

Dependent origination is so much richer than a linear list that needs to be memorized, says Brasington, especially when you can grasp the holographic nature of everything in the universe happening based on everything else happening.

Brasington, a retired computer programmer, began meditating in 1985 and was a senior student of the Theravada teacher Ven. Ayya Khema (1923–1997). He regularly teaches retreats on the jhanas, dependent origination, and insight meditation, and is the author of Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas. His latest work, Dependent Origination and Emptiness, was self-published in 2021 and is available free to download from Brasington’s website (with dana accepted). Below, he speaks with Tricycle about some of the book’s main takeaways.

The book can be very in-depth at times, especially when you’re talking about specific suttas. Can you tell me who your audience is? My target audience was my students while I was writing it, but I think anyone who wants to know more about dependent origination other than “It’s a confusing list of twelve items” will find helpful information in this book.

Examining dependent origination is the richest vein I’ve mined in all of Buddhism. I mean, there are lots of other wonderful topics. But within the first five years of my practice, dependent origination seemed to be the most interesting, the one that had the most depth to it, and the more I explored it, the more interesting I found it to be.

The book was also written to get my thoughts organized in a better way, because every residential or long-term Zoom retreat I’ve taught has had at least one talk on dependent origination—sometimes in the course of the retreat period maybe two or three talks. And if I’m teaching, that’s something I want to share. So it’s also written for people who are interested in a more advanced approach to Buddhism than just the basics, for people who have a little bit of background and want to take it to a deeper level.

“The dukkha arises because you want the world to be different than it is.”

Can you give me your elevator pitch for dependent origination? Dependent origination is the primary teaching that the Buddha gave on how the world works, and in particular how it works in relationship to the arising of dukkha, suffering. In general terms: This arises dependent on that. If that doesn’t happen, this doesn’t happen. It’s this-that conditionality. Dependent origination doctrine gets elaborated quite a bit beyond that, with the most famous elaboration being the twelve links of dependent origination. But the twelve links are an example, not the doctrine: the doctrine is about how things arise dependent on other things.

The Buddha’s quest was: How can I deal with dukkha? He very brilliantly didn’t try to figure out why there is dukkha; what he looked for was the necessary condition for the arising of dukkha. And he found one: craving. And so if it’s a necessary condition, and you can turn it off, then the downstream thing doesn’t happen. So if you don’t want dukkha to happen, turn off the craving.

But I want to emphasize that it’s not so much about cause as conditions—craving doesn’t cause dukkha, even though it’s a necessary condition for the arising of dukkha. If someone you love is dying, it’s not your craving that they do not die that causes the dukkha. The dukkha arises because you want the world to be different than it is. And craving causes your mind to be in a state that’s not in harmony with the way reality is.

You write that the order of the links can be reversed. Can you clarify? The most important thing to do for any decent understanding of dependent origination is to read the twelve links in the reverse order. Dukkha arising is dependent on being born. If you don’t get born, you don’t experience dukkha. If you work that way, you don’t fall into the mistake of trying to see causality, and by working in the reverse you’re more likely to look at conditionality.

You caution readers a few times throughout the book against confusing Buddhism with metaphysics, which makes me think people must do this a lot. Most spiritual traditions are very metaphysically based, explaining how the world is: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There’s all sorts of stuff like that. And when people come to a spiritual tradition, they’re expecting metaphysical explanations. But the Buddha wasn’t doing metaphysics; he was a phenomenologist. And basically, what he was saying was, Pay attention to the phenomena you’re experiencing, and in particular how you’re reacting to the phenomena that you’re experiencing. It’s a different orientation.

I think a lot of people come in looking for metaphysical answers rather than for the end of dukkha. I mean, they definitely like the end of dukkha!

From a practitioner’s standpoint, that sounds like a big relief. You don’t have to figure out why things are the way they are. It takes a little bit of the pressure off.  Yes. It narrows the scope of what we need to focus on if we really want to deal with dukkha. What we need to focus on are our reactions to our sensory input, as opposed to understanding why the universe is like it is.

Old age, sickness, and death. Those are big problems. If you ask somebody for a short definition of what dukkha is they might point to the five daily recollections [old age, sickness, death, being separated from everything one holds dear, and responsibility for one’s actions]. But a lot of what drives our lives as well is the minor irritations. And we need to realize, “Oh, yeah, that’s also dukkha.” Everything that goes wrong in life has the same necessary conditions that we can work with, and it’s probably much easier to work with the simple things than the really big things. If someone you love is dying, it’s going to be really hard to jump in and start working with your craving that they not die. But if you practice with the twelve links along the way, you can have acceptance of the fact that this person has died and not experience mental anguish to the same degree. If you can manage to get the day-to-day irritations to be less irritating, you’ll be left with much better bandwidth for dealing with them and dealing with the bigger ones when they come along.

So we are sweating the small stuff, but we can work on it. You don’t have to sweat it; you just have to deal with it. The Buddha says when there’s dukkha, name it: it’s arising dependent on craving. Now, can you find the craving? Usually we can: we don’t want it to be like it is. Then comes a really tricky one: Can we drop the craving? And sometimes you can, but sometimes you absolutely can’t because it’s too big.

You write in the book about having an insight about dependent origination while eating lettuce. Buddhist teacher Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel has a teaching on dependent origination that quotes the astronomer Carl Sagan, who said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the entire universe.” Is there something particularly about the food environment that lends itself to explaining dependent origination, or is this just a coincidence? I think eating is a rich environment for learning a lot of things. The lettuce actually comes from an insight I had on a retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, I think in 1994. It was a gorgeous day in Northern California, and I went outside to eat my lunch. In my mind—not visually—I could see that I’m eating this lettuce because some poor guy was sweating in the heat to pick it. And the lettuce got put on a truck and eventually got to the store, and somebody bought it and somebody chopped it up. And there it was for me to put in my salad. So I saw the dependently originated nature of the lettuce right there. And I saw the interdependent nature of me and the farmworkers; that was the most profound part. When you can examine what you’re eating and realize all that it took to get that food in front of you, whether it’s an apple pie or a salad or anything else, you start seeing that we’re not independent; we’re vastly dependent on hundreds of millions of other people—unless you’re living off the grid and growing all your own food.

And how does a realization like this chip away at the idea of ourselves? There’s a quote from Nagarjuna:

You are not the same as or different from
Conditions on which you depend;
You are neither severed from
Nor forever fused with them—
This is the deathless teaching
Of buddhas who care for the world.

—Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, trans. Stephen Batchelor

I am not the same as all these conditions that I depend on: the lettuce, electricity, a house. But I’m not different from any of that either; it’s all this stuff coming together that makes me who I am. This leads to the subtitle of the book, Stream of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting. And at this point where the interacting takes place, I use the name “me,” “myself”—it’s just a designation for a bunch of streams that are interacting at this point. This point of interaction has produced what we could call an entity. And it’s being mistaken for something more than it is, because we’re aware of the locus of all these interactions, because we have a sensing mechanism that senses itself.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of every living creature. But our own self-view is perhaps a little bit out of whack, especially in Western culture, and especially in the United States. The other thing to remember about the intersection is that it’s not the end, because every action I do, whether it’s writing a book or buying lettuce in the store, is made up of more streams of dependently arising processes going out there to interact with others to make themselves whatever they become.

The post The Richest Vein in All of Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A contemporary meditator picks up the wisdom-filled classic The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In chapter 15, the geographer asks the Little Prince to describe his planet. “There are three volcanoes,” he says, “two volcanoes are active and the other is extinct.” And then he adds: “I also have a flower.” The geographer informs the Little Prince that they don’t record flowers, because they are ephemeral. Puzzled, the Little Prince asks what that means, shocked to hear that they would fail to register precisely the most beautiful thing. “It means,” replies the geographer, “‘which is threatened by imminent disappearance.’” The Little Prince is devastated. He has just found out that his beloved flower is ephemeral, threatened by imminent disappearance, and he has left her on his planet all alone, with only four thorns as defense.

What should the Little Prince do? Should he let this newly discovered vulnerability of what he loves turn into concern and care? Or should he follow another young prince—Siddhartha Gautama—and sever his ties with the flower, considering that one should not seek what is subject to birth, aging, or imminent disappearance? I imagine that the contemporary meditator would read the Little Prince’s episode with tenderness, finding it cold to infer that he should disengage from the flower. Yet exactly that is what early Buddhism teaches. Why else would the early texts have the Buddha on his deathbed reprimand his crying disciple, saying,

Enough, Ananda! Do not grieve, do not lament. Did I not prepare for this when I explained that we must be parted and separated from all we hold dear and beloved?”

(Digha Nikaya 16, trans. Ajahn Sujato)

The hypothetical meditator could remark that this is a false dichotomy, that not clinging doesn’t mean not caring, that equanimity is not indifference, that one must remain mindful and equanimous toward the flower but can still enjoy contemplating it, watering it, and so forth. I do not disagree, but I am not convinced that this attitude represents early Buddhism. It is later forms of Buddhism that maintain one can enjoy without attachment, and I fail to see how you can care for something—let us replace the flower with your mother—and not suffer because of its ephemeral nature. But the early Buddhist discourses take Ananda’s distress as falling short of the ideal they pursue.

It is later forms of Buddhism that maintain one can enjoy without attachment.

Our hypothetical meditator stands for a current trend of life-affirming dharma that focuses on specific elements of the earliest phase of Buddhist teaching while distancing itself from certain Theravada doctrines—we can call it neo-early Buddhism. In a certain sense, it continues the emphasis on “authenticity” and texts that characterizes Buddhist modernism. We see this trend in institutions in the United States and Europe that self-identify as “early Buddhist,” as well as in the popularity enjoyed by the writings of prolific scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo (not his work itself but its reception). This patent interest in early Buddhist teaching even overlaps with a secular mindfulness audience. If you identify as practicing mainly on the basis of the early texts and you liked the opening quote of this essay—quite antithetical to them—you may be a neo-early Buddhist.

I do not wish to argue against neo-early or early Buddhism in themselves, but as a contemporary practitioner enthralled with early Buddhism myself, I cannot help but notice certain contradictions and peculiar habits of interpretation. Thus, I offer this reflection simply to raise issues so we can all further reflect upon them.

Early Buddhism is a renunciant tradition founded on a (very human) rejection of negative affect. In contrast, neo-early Buddhism presents itself as a life-affirming dharma that enjoins people to accept the difficult and tragic as part of life. The tensions here are far greater than acknowledged. I wonder how honest we are being with ourselves. Either we are not thinking hard and systematically enough about the teachings because we are afraid to find we clash with much more than we want to admit, or we are very motivated (consciously or not) to agree with ancient texts and traditions. If the former is true, we are holding the lid on a potentially bursting crisis of faith, and therefore deluding ourselves. If it is the latter, why not yield to the mindset of those 5th-century BCE renunciants from the Gangetic plain?

“Rejection” above may sound dissonant with the goal of overcoming the fire of aversion and with the ideal of being beyond preferences. But aiming to transcend all pain and reach its cessation means that at some level there is wanting to get rid of it. Buddhism calls negative affect dukkha, a word meaning “pain, suffering, discomfort.” Life is filled with dukkha in three ways: as experiences that are painful or unpleasant (dukkha dukkha, felt dukkha), as the transiency and inevitable ending of pleasant experiences (viparinama dukkha, anticipatory dukkha), and as the structure of what it means to be a living thing (sankhara dukkha, potential dukkha). The first sense of dukkha is self-evident. The second refers to how good things often end badly or, more simply, that they end, which hurts or leaves one empty. And the third and the most abstract reflects how transiency, unreliability, and dependence are baked into the recipe of living things—not something that will sustain complete satisfaction. The best-case scenario for a date, for example, is that two true soulmates find each other and live in absolute bliss until one of them dies, leaving the other one heartbroken.

Discussions on whether this teaching is pessimistic have a long history. It is certainly not optimistic about life, because the solution it offers to this predicament consists in no longer being born. Early Buddhism rebelled against the negative affect of dukkha in its three senses, and since dukkha is unavoidable and they saw life as cyclical, the solution was to escape existence altogether. Another implicit presentation of potential dukkha is as follows: it is because we feel at all that we feel pain, that we can hurt; therefore it is best we leave this feeling thing behind. Meditative states devoid of phenomenal experience, or nibbana as the utter ending of cyclical existence, are the accomplishment of this, and they are called bliss (sukha) precisely because they are devoid of feeling (vedana). Paradox aside, the point is that the absence of feeling and of lived experience is positively valued, and practitioners strive toward that goal: there will be no feeling as there will be no contact, no sense-spheres, and so on.

Think of the dentist. No one would take early Buddhism to be against enduring dental pain for the greater good of healthy teeth in this life. But in the bigger scheme of things, it still prioritizes avoiding dental pain, so it prefers to forgo teeth altogether. Some early discourses use a threefold template consisting of the gratification (assada, literally “sweetness”), drawback (adinava) and way out (nissarana) with regard to something; the third resolves the dilemma posed by the previous two. Let us apply this haiku-like approach to the Little Prince: that the flower is pleasant or brings satisfaction is its sweetness, that it does not last is its drawback, and the way out of this dilemma is to abandon passion (chanda-raga) for the flower. In this way, the Little Prince would deprive the mechanism that drives cyclic existence of its fuel, reaching the goal of experiencing neither the sweetness nor the drawback of the flower. It is the philosophy of “no head, no headache.” In this sense early Buddhism is renunciant, world- or life-denying.

While all these reasonings are loyal to the early Buddhist texts, I can barely find them in contemporary teachings that claim to have their roots in those texts. Contemporary teachings value experience rather than praise its cessation. How does this square with all experience being dukkha and with the goal of ending dukkha? Today dukkha tends to be interpreted as the imperfect character of all that we experience, as that tragic side of “the nature of things” that we do not like to dwell upon but without which our lives are rendered depthless: we live in denial and perhaps even more afraid of pain and loss than if we faced its inevitability. I think of it in this way too. However, it is a reinterpretation.

With this reinterpretation, the doctrine that “whatever is conditioned or impermanent is dukkha” sounds like a fact. But it is not a fact: it is a judgment. Whether we translate dukkha as painful, suffering, imperfect, or unsatisfactory, since existence contains a diverse mix of experiences, calling it dukkha as a whole can only be an evaluation. For example, a good thing that ends, bringing distress, is a combination of pleasure and pain, moments of satisfaction and dissatisfaction distributed in time. To label it dukkha overall is an evaluative judgment—one you can agree with but a judgment nonetheless, not a fact. To claim that experiences are dukkha (in the anticipatory and potential senses) because by nature they will and always can involve felt dukkha makes this the most relevant feature. This is not math but a choice of emphasis that sits on a rejection of negative affect. Someone could consider that a certain good experience that brought pain when it ended was nevertheless worth it rather than ultimately unsatisfactory. In making dukkha the most salient feature, early Buddhism transfers our natural avoidance of felt pain and discomfort to life generally. Thus this doctrine is at the core of the early Buddhist renunciant or world-denying orientation. Yet even if I am to turn toward the difficult, toward this felt pain and discomfort, what reason do I have to see all of experience through its lens?

How aware is this movement of itself as neo-early? Or is it really neo-early?

Perhaps instinctively, contemporary Buddhists see the achievement of a deep level of acceptance as a goal, but I seriously question whether early Buddhists did: their very explicit aim is to eradicate all dukkha—in the felt, anticipatory, and potential senses; what fuels the practice is an ethos of rejecting negative affect and aiming to transcend it.

It is here that I become confused: does neo-early Buddhism share this ethos? Because with one hand it spreads life-affirmation, and with the other it still holds on to the judgment that everything conditioned or impermanent is dukkha. Yet such a judgment is necessarily renunciant, incompatible with embracing negative affect in an ultimate sense.

The usual way of ironing this out is to restrict the sense of dukkha to psychological malaise. However, this just relocates the wrinkles. Should Ananda have remained psychologically unmoved by the impending death of his teacher, to whom he had been closer than anyone else? Should the Little Prince be dedicated to his flower but magically not suffer if anything happened to her? Is that even coherent? And what do you do about your mother?

Neo-early Buddhism is as free to reinterpret Buddhist teachings as all other traditions have been—Buddhism’s diversity attests to this—and being critical is a dimension of this process. How aware is this movement of itself as neo-early? Or is it really neo-early? When we reinterpret halfway (or half consciously), we may leave in place structures we do not actually agree with but on which our house is built, no matter how heavily decorated. The result can be an incoherent teaching, a practice that misfits its theoretical framework without quite knowing what is wrong. We foster confusion. Enthusiastic practitioners of “turning toward the difficult” and “stopping to smell the flowers” plunge into the waters of ancient Buddhist texts only to find no shoal of accept-verbs. The injunction to mindfully know any pleasant or unpleasant feeling as it is may sound like a candidate, yet it swims next to the injunctions to regard the pleasant smell as dukkha and to not welcome or approve it. If the flower brings delight but is impermanent, the “way out” could be to remain aware of it without greed or attachment, but often this is just the neo-early Buddhist method of getting away with enjoyment, perhaps called “appreciation.” Is that appreciation compatible with not delighting, rejoicing, or finding pleasure in the flower? Let us consider the following passage:

Udayi, there are five strands of sense pleasure. What five? Images known by the eye, sounds known by the ear, smells known by the nose, tastes known by the tongue, and tactile sensations known by the body that are desired, agreeable, pleasing, and lovely. The pleasure and happiness that arises from these five strands of sense pleasure is called sensual, filthy, ordinary, and ignoble pleasure. Such pleasure should not be pursued, cultivated, or developed. I say that it should be feared.

(Majjhima Nikaya 66)

So should neo-early Buddhists abandon what is changing and not-us, as another text, the Alagaddupama Sutta, tells us, or not? Do we turn toward or away from what is subject to birth, sickness, aging, and death? Is mindful gardening recommended, or should that hobby be relinquished through understanding how pleasant floral sensations are constantly vanishing? Since early Buddhism aspired to transcend all negative affect, and since it is natural to suffer for the loss of what you care for, one must disengage, detach, or whatever one’s preferred term is. One must regard the flower as if one regarded dirt, with no preference. There is no place here to recommend sniffing the roses unless we do the same with excrement—a suggestion that would not be far-fetched. Botanical appreciation is not the flavor of most early Buddhist texts. Were this wrong, it would be hard to make sense of the goal of “no more birth” and no more flowers.

Neo-early Buddhists would hardly chastise Ananda for his grief and would tell the Little Prince to care for the flower while never forgetting its impermanence—an impermanence that would not, however, require a lack of interest. Such a characteristic approach, distinct from early Buddhism, seems to me a natural consequence of not instinctively regarding life as cyclical. No matter how agnostic we may try to be about rebirth, the worldview we grew up in remains for many of us as a default perspective we cannot simply shake off. With the scope set to one lifetime, the amount of what can be done about dukkha dwindles greatly. There is little we can do about much of the felt dukkha that life allots us, a bit more we can do about anticipatory dukkha, and there is nothing whatsoever we can do about potential dukkha. That is because dukkha is only completely eradicated by not being (re)born. We can reduce felt dukkha to its bare minimum: the pain of illness, death, unpleasant sensory stimuli; in dharmic jargon, we can keep it to the first arrow. And through insight, we can decrease the suffering of change, of good things ending; but the extreme of completely eradicating it entails not caring—or a similar stance, one that I doubt neo-early Buddhists would cherish as an ideal.

Since certain forms of dukkha are perceived as just part of this one life, the problem of dukkha mutates. Any such “natural dukkha” is no longer on the list of what one’s practice aims to overcome. I regard this as nothing more than the very understandable outcome of a culture crash. Nevertheless, this outlook is something new that draws from early Buddhist texts while replacing the whole frame—it is not early Buddhism. My point is not that this is a bad thing but that frame-switching should be more transparent and more critical. A life-affirming dharma has no reason to maintain that everything conditioned and impermanent is dukkha; for the latter doctrine makes full sense only when we aspire to leave cyclic existence. Like Saint-Exupéry’s geographer, early Buddhism does not record the flowers—by the same token, it does not record anything lived at all, as everything is equally ephemeral. But neo-early Buddhists do.

Our hypothetical meditator has been thinking throughout this essay that the teachings on dukkha have nevertheless been very useful for their life, here and now. Indeed, dukkha is a strategy of meaning-making. And sometimes apparently defeatist outlooks can bring freedom and drive away anxiety, like when right after midnight on New Year’s Eve it started raining and I said to myself that 2021 would continue to be shitty COVID-wise. I felt immediate relief, as all the constant hoping that “things will be better in two months” dissolved and could no longer be frustrated. Maybe the doctrine of dukkha has always helped practitioners accept the tragic side of life, even at the time of the Buddha. I say only that this doctrine does not merely observe that things are imperfect but directs one to leave the world as a response, and that this matters as we shift from “let us get out of here” to “let us accept this here.”

When we naturally suffer as a result of change or loss (1), early Buddhism wants to point out that this is what happens always—it is dukkha, after all (2)—and that it can be avoided by not being (re)born (3). The middle bit of this three-part reasoning creates meaning in a way that leads to the conclusion, the renunciant exit sign. Shifting to today’s neo-early Buddhist discourse: when we naturally suffer as a result of change or loss (1), if we do not aim to avoid that through not being (re)born (3), what meaning does it create to emphasize that pain and make it the summary of our experience (2)? This is a question for us all. To take away the renunciant conclusion—the exit sign—but keep the reasoning or strategy that led there is to leave the work half done.

The content of a doctrine is linked to—but is not the same as—its effect on our being. Which matters more? For example, teachings on buddhanature claim that we are already awakened; but doctrine aside, their effect can be a trust in our abilities, a psychological shift away from unhelpful relationships with a goal perceived as distant. Similarly, one could interpret the early Buddhist teachings on dukkha as a method to help people come to terms with their existential condition, articulated in the way permitted by the generally accepted worldview of the Buddha’s culture. We find hints of such pragmatism, whether conscious or not: a passage in the Kalama Sutta concerning karma and rebirth that looks like a Buddhist version of Pascal’s wager; the fact that the problem of many other sects’ wrong views is that they deny ethical consequence; or the shocking Abhidharmic suggestion (in the Patthana) that belief in a self can be skillful, for the same ethical reason. This is speculative, of course, but I would argue that even a renunciant path is undertaken and maintained only because it gives this life meaning—no other-world-oriented system can be fully other-worldly. Despite pragmatisms, the renunciant flavor of early Buddhist discourse is too markedly different from most people’s affect and character today, and the desirable effects of certain teachings or beliefs do not, by themselves, justify keeping the doctrinal content. Since some of the doctrinal content of early Buddhism clashes with much in neo-early Buddhism, then why do we keep that content?

So much stress on the early texts, coupled with seeing them as the word of the Buddha rather than as a collective creation of the first generations of his followers, makes it emotionally difficult to openly—or even inwardly—disagree with the Buddha; this is what makes Buddhism a religion. Thus traditions and contemporary teachers alike have tended to photoshop their reinterpretations onto the original, calling them “what the Buddha actually meant,” “the secret teaching,” “mind-to-mind transmission,” and so forth. In contrast, philosophers and scientists continue the work of those whom they admire while also raising objections, and a jazz musician plays a Duke Ellington composition that does not sound the way Duke played it. If asked, they would not hesitate to admit to their innovations. Buddhists, however, feel pressure to concur with what is in the texts and are inclined to resolve cognitive dissonance with semiconscious reinterpretations rather than dissent. I remember reading certain canonical passages and feeling that dissonance rubbing against a discernible wish to agree with the text. It was partly unconscious, but as far as I can recall it there was awareness of the process. Buddhist history contains cases of overt dissent nevertheless, like Zen radicality or the layered approach of different yanas, or “vehicles.” It may have been in wrestling with the issues raised here that later Buddhists said the way out was not really out:

Those who, afraid of sufferings arising from the discrimination of birth-and-death, seek for nirvana, do not know that birth-and-death and nirvana are not to be separated the one from the other; and, seeing that all things subject to discrimination have no reality, imagine that nirvana consists in the future annihilation of the senses and their fields.

—Lankavatara Sutra, trans. D. T. Suzuki

The author(s) of the Lankavatara Sutra is unhappy with the rejection of negative affect and the “no head, no headache” philosophy. Still, reform has tended to keep and repurpose, just like when I reorganize my room: I rarely throw anything away for good. But if we today stop using the renunciant framework altogether, then we must ask what other pieces of the puzzle need to be reshuffled or discarded: the extent to which sensuality is a problem, meditative practices designed to perceive everything as dukkha, not-self as a way of disengaging, the implications of all this for a lay life, and so on. I fully understand the looming fear connected to these questions, but we are very much in our dharmic childhood: did we expect to have gotten it right already?

The recent trend in dharma circles that we may call “neo-early Buddhism” differs in fundamental respects from the early Buddhist texts it claims as basis, and it should be more open about that. Chiefly, it is life- or world-affirming, which early Buddhism is not. I have argued that the doctrine that “everything conditioned and impermanent is dukkha,” one element of the rationale for wanting to leave the world, is a renunciant doctrine. Since in affirming life neo- early Buddhism affirms the impermanent and conditioned rather than attempting to get away from it, it is senseless for it to maintain that everything conditioned and impermanent is dukkha. I have suggested that this inconsistency stems from two things: from not instinctively regarding life as cyclical and from an emotional difficulty in disagreeing with the Buddha. The latter facilitates relating to those teachings that create cognitive dissonance in a way that is dishonest and unhelpful, planting the seeds of future confusion, stuckness, or even crises of faith, and that does not help to harmonize our values, our goals, and our means to reach them. I hope I am exaggerating.

The post The New Tradition of Early Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

All day, Ben lies on the couch reading a giant history of war. But he got it at a used-book store so it only goes up to World War I.

In the summer of 1914, there was an electric tension in the air. It would not be long until the descent into the madness of the first fully mechanized war. The British statesman Sir Edward Grey famously predicted what was to come. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

At bedtime, Eli and I start Prince Caspian. At the beginning, the children are pulled out of a train station and land on an uninhabited island. They wander around until they find a bit of a stone wall. Eli realizes it is the ruins of the Narnia castle before I do. Then he starts asking questions. Will he still be alive when I die? If not, what will he do?

I tell him that old dodge. That it will be a long, long time before I do. That we will all live a long, long time.

But this is not what he wants to know.

◼︎◼︎◼︎

Lately, Ben has been sending up trial balloons about other neighborhoods. But when we look up the rents they are ridiculously high. I keep worrying he will suggest New Jersey, but he never does.

He has an idea for the summer though. He wants to send Eli to camp at a historic estate where they teach kids to churn butter and herd goats. Eli does not want to go. “It’s you that wants to go,” I tell him.

◼︎◼︎◼︎

I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action. One night Ben and I go to a meeting about justice at the Unitarian church down the street. Good people all around, making plans, assisting—so why do I feel so embarrassed?

Most are older than we are; they speak of how others have helped them; they give thanks for those who have reached out and call on us to think about the less fortunate.

It’s church. I remember now how it went.

“I thought you wanted community,” Ben says afterward. But not so much. Not like that. All that eye contact. “Not my tribe,” I tell him.

I miss the express bus and have to take the local home instead. Just the other day I heard one woman tell another that slowness is a form of goodness. This bus is full of old Russian people holding shopping bags between their feet. I sit across from a hot guy in a green coat who looks as if he’s trying to place me. When I was younger, I sometimes knew why a man was staring at me, but these days it’s often no more than a lapse in memory.

He has a pouch of tobacco in his pocket and a ratty backpack that looks like it’s been to war. There’s a book sticking out of it, but not far enough to read its title. Ben told me once that the Greeks had this term, epoché, meaning “I suspend judgment.” Useful for those of us prone to making common cause with strangers on buses. Sudden alliances, my brother calls them. I have to be careful. My heart is prodigal.

It’s raining. The bus is full. It’s reached that density where being seated feels like a form of guilt. I look around. I will grudgingly stand for the infirm and the pregnant and those with children. But miraculously, it is all able-bodied teenagers with earbuds. I forgot my phone, or I too would have blotted out all these humans.

The guy in the green coat keeps glancing at me. “From the library,” I tell him, and he nods slowly, respectfully, it seems. “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he says. He has a slight accent and I wonder if he comes from some distant country where librarians are held in high esteem.

We get off at Coney Island Avenue. When he stands up, I see it is a field guide to mushrooms.

Pouring now. The pigeons have all flown away. The drug dealer from 5C holds the door open for me. We shake the rain off our umbrellas.

◼︎◼︎◼︎

Sylvia has a new escape plan. She wants to buy a trailer in the darkest place in America. She lived there once years ago with an ex who was an amateur astronomer. It’s in Nevada somewhere, hours and hours from the nearest city. On a clear night, you can see the Pinwheel galaxy with the naked eye, she says. Later, I look it up and learn it is twenty-five million light-years away.

No more campaigning, no more fund-raising, no more obligatory notes of hope. Already things she worked on for years have been swept away with the stroke of a pen. All she wants now is to go somewhere quiet and dark, she says.

Withdrawal to the desert is called anachoresis in Greek.

◼︎◼︎◼︎

The meditation class is no longer crowded. I find out a lot of people left recently because of something Margot said. Someone asked her what she thought about the waves of recent allegations in the press. She said that it caused her great sadness to think of these men’s dishonorable actions. But she dismissed the language of victims and perpetrators. When she was asked about punishment, she spoke instead of reincarnation. Everyone here has done everything to everyone else, she said.

Which explains why today it’s just me and three straight guys listening to her. She is talking about how dukkha, which is usually translated as “suffering,” can have other meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism, the word is sometimes slanted differently, she says. Instead of saying that life is suffering, they might say that life is tolerable. As in just barely.

♦

From Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill. © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Knopf.

The post Life Is Tolerable appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Pali word dukkha (duhkha in Sanskrit), usually translated as “suffering,” sits at the heart of the Buddha’s four noble truths—which boil down to (1) dukkha exists, (2) dukkha arises from causes, and (3) we can end dukkha (4) by following the Buddha’s path to awakening. This central term is best understood alongside the related word sukha. The prefix su- generally means “good, easy, and conducive to well-being,” and the prefix du- correspondingly means “bad, difficult, and inclining toward illness or harm.” On the most basic level, then, sukha means pleasant while dukkha means unpleasant. The noble truth of suffering, however, does not simply refer to bodily pain; its meaning is far more subtle and rich.

One can also feel mental pleasure and pain. Here, the twin prefixes are employed again. A “good mind” (su-manas) is contrasted with a “bad mind” (du-manas) to yield the Pali words most often used to describe happiness (somanassa) and sorrow (domanassa), also known as mental pleasure and mental pain. Here, happiness and sorrow simply refer to the experience of a painful or pleasurable feeling, which is different from emotional pleasure or pain. When Buddhist teachings talk about emotions, such as love and hate, they are describing our disposition toward the things we encounter. This important distinction can be easily lost in translation.

Dukkha is further used to describe the disappointment that comes when the things we are fond of inevitably change and slip through our hands. The Pali term for this is viparinama­-dukkha, meaning the suffering of change, which the second noble truth explains is caused by craving and attachment. We experience emotional pain when we crave either pleasure or the absence of pain, and don’t get what we want. Mind- fulness practice is designed to help us abandon this craving by replacing it with emotional equanimity.

Beyond the physical, mental, and psychological sense of dukkha, we might add an existential sense of these words. In Pali texts, the feeling that the very conditions of the world we inhabit are unsatisfactory is called sankhara-­dukkha, or the suffering of conditioned reality. The fact that all beings must consume to live and that we will age, become ill, and die are also sources of suffering.

Fortunately, there is a corresponding state of existential well-being—the liberation from suffering that comes about with awakening.

The post What’s in a Word? Dukkha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The bodhisattva vow describes, to some extent, a reality that we know is not possible—a cessation of all of the suffering in this world. At the same time, the vow affirms its own unachievability. We know it’s not possible to alleviate all of the distress and affliction in this world, but we act as if it is possible to do so. These vows reflect the two primary orientations of compassion: the receptive aspect that is willing to listen to the cries of suffering of the world and the outward-turning aspect that is willing to engage with the world to alleviate that suffering. 

Compassion is a broad-spectrum word: it includes meanings of patience, forbearance, tolerance, resilience, empathy, courage, and dedication. The Pali term for compassion is actually two words: anukampa karuna. Anukampa literally means “to tremble with.” This meaning points to the empathic dimension of compassion that resonates with and is touched by the suffering of another, as well as to the quivering of the heart in the face of suffering. The other and perhaps more familiar word, karuna, derives from the Sanskrit root meaning “to do or to make” or, in one version, “to turn outward.” Karuna captures the dimension of compassion that responds to the situation and seeks to alleviate suffering through action. There’s a dynamic relationship between these two aspects of compassion, because our engagement in the world must be attuned to the situation, which requires us to be present and listen deeply. 

There’s a story in the Zen tradition: a student asks the Zen master (Yunmen), “What is the goal of a lifetime of practice?” It’s a big question that we could ask of our own practice. The answer that comes back is this: “An appropriate response.” 

An appropriate response. What if our practice is all about developing our capacity to respond more appropriately to the whole spectrum of human experience? And these two Pali words, anukampa karuna, with their different meanings, point to the way that we can attune ourselves to respond more compassionately through deep listening—to people, to situations, to currents in our society, as well as to our own embodied hearts and minds.

Naturally, this deep listening includes the suffering that immediately affects others and everything around us. But we must also listen to the cries of our own heart and mind, where we encounter distress, dukkha [suffering], and our familiar, habitual reactions to meeting feelings that we don’t know how to bear. The reactions we are so familiar with are to clench, contract, turn away, blame, become angry, or despair. The response that is asked of us, the appropriate response, is to touch this distress with care and empathy.

Fear of suffering shapes the choices we make and our sense of who we are as a person. We can easily come to believe that dukkha is a sign of our failure or unworthiness. However, if we can learn to find the confidence to turn toward dukkha, many of the agitations in our life will calm. This means learning to put down the arguments with the unarguables, and the hidden belief that we are exempt from the first ennobling truth that there is dukkha in this life. 

Compassion is a commitment to both healing this suffering and uprooting the causes of suffering. Some statues of Kwan Yin [the bodhisattva of compassion] have a thousand hands and arms, each of them with some symbol that represents a different kind of response: a vase of ointment to soothe and heal, a willow branch to bless, and all kinds of weaponry dedicated to uprooting dukkha and its origins in confusion, ignorance, craving, and aversion. It goes to show that the range of appropriate responses is large and wide. Sometimes suffering can be intense and have no easy resolution. In those kinds of situations, compassion is bearing with the impulses to try to prematurely solve situations. Compassion becomes our willingness to keep showing up: to listen deeply, bear witness, and be with suffering.

In our time, one of Kwan Yin’s hands may hold a banner that says “Black Lives Matter,” or “We Ask For Democracy,” or “Keep Fossil Fuels In The Ground.” Many forms of suffering are systemic—not just personal and psychological. Our practice needs to acknowledge these forces, and sometimes we need to stand against structural forms of suffering. Compassion also lies in our capacity to say “no.” To be able to accept and embrace what is does not mean that everything is acceptable. There is much in this life that is not acceptable—things that perpetuate, create, and recreate dukkha. We need to be clear about when to show up, when to embrace, when to say “no,” and when to commit to healing and to liberating. 

But when compassion calls for a fierce “no”—a fierce protest against unethical activity, against those who perpetuate suffering, racism, violence, or greed—can there also be the wisdom of not othering, not blaming, not turning people into an enemy? This is probably one of the greatest challenges of developing compassion—to know how to bring that same empathy to ignorance as we would to blameless or innocent suffering. It’s not difficult to find compassion for a crying child or for the frailty of a very elderly person struggling to get through their day. But in our practice we are asked to leave no one out of our widening field of concern and care.

Ajahn Sucitto, a teacher in the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism, recommends one practice called “Just like me.” In situations of suffering, we practice seeing the common humanity and shared vulnerability we all have. We might hear a siren go by and be reminded of human vulnerability, and think, “Oh, just like me.” When we see someone behaving in a way that we consider wrong, we practice recognition of the “just like me” vulnerability that we share, our common vulnerability to impulsiveness, reactivity, greed, hatred, and delusion. 

It is not about what we feel or what we can actually accomplish, it is about the intentions that we commit to and embody in our lives. Compassion is a practice of seeing beyond the automatic reactivity of the heart, and a striving to achieve the goals of an impossible vow.

The post An Appropriate Response appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to the Hebrew Bible, after creating the world, God looked out over everything he had made and saw that it was very good. Most of us want to feel that this world is good, or at least basically good. But this desire runs up against a grim and complex reality, aptly characterized by Ernest Becker in his book Denial of Death:

What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue? . . . Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer.

Becker’s question resonates: In this world, where life feeds on life, an individual sentient being, in itself, seems to be of no ultimate worth. (It has been said that nature values the idea of the individual, but not any particular individual.) How are we ever to find rest in such a world?

The unfortunate truth is that my experience is anything but restful. For the most part we spend our days drawing lines between the acceptable and the unacceptable, embracing what we will and rejecting the rest. We judge and choose, fret and worry. Yet despite centuries of humans laboring to remedy the psychological, sociological, and biological ills that make our existence a continuing struggle, the suffering persists. A suspicion arises that there may be, after all, some structural flaw at the center of things, some ugly defect that cannot be erased, repaired, or explained away. It can feel, in our darker moments, as if something is fundamentally wrong with us, and with this world, something that we cannot and should not accept, much less love. This suspicion, however, is too much to bear. So we avert our gaze and get on with our day-to-day lives.

According to the traditional story, Prince Gautama, the man who would later be known as the Buddha, could not avert his gaze. His encounter with aging, sickness, and death triggered a spiritual crisis, culminating in his insight under the Bodhi tree, which he later conveyed in the form of a medical diagnosis: Human beings, he declared, are ill, subject to a chronic malaise that infects everything we experience—even what we most desire, what passes for happiness. This is the first noble truth: Dis-ease (dukkha) is our disease.

To appreciate what is involved here, one must see how it’s possible to be ill without realizing it; the early signs of cancer can easily be written off as incidental aches and pains. Recognizing and acknowledging the symptoms of illness is the initial, indispensable step toward seeking a cure.

The most obvious manifestation of our dis-ease, according to the Buddhist analysis, is the anxiety bound up with physical and mental pain. The distinction between dis-ease—a spiritual affliction—and mundane, unavoidable pain is easiest to discern in our experience of physical discomfort. Here’s an example from my life:

Years ago, as a young college student, I worked as a waiter at a restaurant where the principal chef was a big, intimidating man who routinely bullied us all with the sheer force of his physical presence. One day while chopping shallots he nicked a finger. I happened to be picking up an order when the accident happened, and I saw him lift his hand and hold it there, staring with obvious distress at the cut. A tiny drop of blood beaded where the razor-sharp blade had grazed his finger. He examined it for a moment, his face paled and he dropped to the floor, unconscious.

There is the physical sensation of pain and there is our dis-ease about the pain—an existential distress that accompanies and can actually dwarf the physical sensation. Buddhist teachings suggest that this holds true for physical as well as psychological pain: a similar kind of agitation is present whenever our experience runs counter to our desires. When I don’t get what I want, I become restless, worried, fearful. That is to say, I’m not only unhappy; I am also anxious about my unhappiness.

Less obvious, but equally pervasive, is the dis-ease that emerges when what begins as pleasure merges imperceptibly into pain. Once again, here’s an example.

In my sophomore year at college I bought a sports car—a Triumph GT-6. A dark blue fastback with wire spoke wheels and a dashboard made of real, polished wood. The car rode so low to the ground that at a stoplight I could hang my arm over the open window and stub out a cigarette on the pavement. I had to work hard to make the monthly payments, but the pleasure I got out of driving this racy British machine made it worth the effort. Or so it seemed, for a while. This was the late 1960s. American cars were enormous. My little British roadster was hard to spot from the cockpit of a GTO or a Camaro—much less from the driver’s seat of a Buick Electra 225 like the one my father drove. Parking lots were particularly dangerous places. Several times I returned to my car to find a gash in the fender where someone had backed into it. Whenever this happened, I would take it to the body shop for repairs. One time, when the car was parked, a passing stranger wantonly snapped off the antenna, which I replaced—what’s the point of having the perfect car when its perfection is marred? All of this was expensive, of course. I was working at that same restaurant I mentioned above; the boss was a jerk, and the schedule so tight I didn’t have enough time to study for my classes. The pressure of keeping up with school and job was intense, but for months I stuck with it. Until one day I had an epiphany.

I was out for a drive, alone, listening to Simon & Garfunkel on the eight-track tape player. I had stopped at an intersection and just a few feet in front of where I sat with the engine idling two undergraduate girls were crossing the street. One of them tossed her hair back carelessly, blond curls flashing in the sunlight. She was laughing and, preoccupied with their discussion, clearly took no notice of me. But I noticed her. And I noticed that neither of them noticed me. And what’s more, I noticed that I cared. But why, I reflected, should they look at me? And why should I be upset if they don’t? And yet I was distressed. I wanted very much for those two girls to acknowledge me sitting there in my shiny British sports car. In fact, I needed them to look. When I realized all this, a curtain was momentarily drawn back, permitting me an insight into the role the car played in my life. It was supposed to be making me happy by enhancing an image of myself that I desperately wanted to project, but it had become instead the source of a great deal of anxiety. The cost of maintaining this self-image was suddenly crystal clear. I felt lonely and, in my loneliness, both sad and absurd.

When the traffic light changed, I drove directly to the bank and asked what I owed them, went from there to a used car lot and sold the Triumph for exactly the amount I owed, then hitchhiked back to the bank and paid off the loan. I went from there to the insurance company and canceled my policy. All of this was accomplished within the space of a few hours, and the sense of relief was extraordinary. It was as if I’d been set free from prison. I’d been stressed out for months, but hadn’t been willing to admit it to myself—or even to see it. That night I had my shifts at work reduced by half.

This was a few years before I encountered Buddhism, but in that moment at the stoplight I glimpsed the lineaments of a principle with much broader application.

We can become so focused on the idea of pleasure that it takes a while to realize that whatever pleasure might originally have been there has long since morphed into pain, and we may not be able to pinpoint when the transformation occurred. Moreover, by the time we acknowledge the truth, chances are we have already turned our attention to some new fantasy of happiness. So the cycle continues, flourishing as it does on our near boundless capacity for denial.

Sigmund Freud saw denial as a basic coping mechanism, a strategy of the ego to protect itself from any perceived threat to its integrity. Sustained marital conflict, drug or alcohol addiction, compulsive behaviors surrounding money or food or professional status, the exercise of unearned social or economic privilege—anything that might make us feel vulnerable or guilty can in principle be denied. When confronted with a situation too uncomfortable or threatening to accept, the ego rejects the empirical facts, insisting that whatever it is could not be a problem despite the presence of prodigious evidence to the contrary.

Denial differs, however, from a straightforward refusal to accept what is seen to be true; for to be in denial means that I simply do not see the truth. It is to Freud’s credit that he illuminated how denial operates below the radar, where it allows us to live with what would otherwise be unbearable.

But how deep does our denial reach? How much of life is unbearable?

Which brings us to the subtlest level of our dis-ease, referred to in Pali as sankhara-dukkha.

According to Buddhist teachings, both unhappiness and happiness are infected by our dis-ease. As I discussed earlier, when we are unhappy, we are also anxious about our unhappiness. A similar principle holds true for happiness: We are anxious because our happiness is never all that we want it to be. At the very least, we are attached to our present happiness, and we want it to last, even though we know from experience that it won’t. (As Allen Ginsberg once observed, every marriage harbors an implicit question: Who will die first?) But we are seldom conscious of the residual anxiety caused by our attachment to happiness. In fact, what we take for happiness is so tenuous and fragile that it can only exist in a state of denial, an implicit commitment to not consciously acknowledge anything that might destroy the illusion and reveal the depth of anxiety just below the surface.

Sankhara-dukkha is an existential or, perhaps better, a spiritual dis-ease that permeates my identity as an individual person—which is to say, my entire psychological life. Merely to exist as an individual, to identify with a particular set of memories and traits, hopes and dreams, is to be dis-eased. This truth is hidden behind a cloud of denial, which periodically allows for the illusion of happiness. Certainly we learn to accept that life is far from perfect and that it brings times of sadness and even despair, but the first noble truth goes much deeper. We do not see—nor do we want to see—how everything about our experience, including our pleasure, is inherently dis-eased. Our denial, in this sense, is the groundwork of the personality, the bulwark of my sense of myself as one person set apart from others. We find it virtually impossible to admit—as Prince Gautama did when he left the palace—that our hard-won moments of happiness are a charade. It is simply too much to bear.

The difficulty of breaking through denial is in direct proportion to the significance of the truth that is buried. To see how the car I wanted so badly had become a source of anxiety took some time, but it was relatively easy. To see that my marriage is hopelessly dysfunctional—or that I’m an alcoholic, or that I hate a job I can’t afford to quit—is considerably more difficult, for it may demand that I reappraise my entire life from the ground up. But even that is a relatively simple task compared to what we’re dealing with at this third, and most subtle level of dis-ease. To see how I am, by my very constitution as a self-conscious individual, condemned to suffer places an inconceivable burden on the psyche. No wonder Buddhism teaches that this most subtle form of dis-ease is perceived only at a very advanced stage of the spiritual life when attachment to the self has already become so attenuated that one no longer resists such an insight.

The characteristic response of denial, when confronted with the truth, is anger. This can’t be what Buddhism teaches. It is simply too bitter a pill to swallow.

Denial always comes at a price, however, and the cost of not facing up to the truth of our dis-ease is high. The more I wriggle and squirm, scheme and strategize to get what I want, the more hopelessly dis-eased I become. But when the nature of my illness—the quiet desperation of the isolated, individual self, striving to be happy—is unearthed, brought into the light of awareness and clearly seen for what it is, then this very seeing becomes the cure. This is where the spiritual path began for Prince Gautama, which is no doubt why, as the Buddha, he made the pointing out of dis-ease the subject of his first noble truth.

What is seen is unending turmoil. What is not seen is the seeing itself, a limitless, empty space, always and everywhere at rest.

The post The Denial of Dis-ease appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

My dog Widget was 7 when we adopted him from the shelter—a plain brown dog, a little underweight, silent and watchful. He is a quiet, unobtrusive dog, introverted, but disliking solitude. Sometimes he pushes gently at my hand for attention. For reassurance.

The vet and I have a talk. The same talk, again. We review the borderline liver failure, the declining kidney function, the bad digestion. How he drags a back foot sometimes, stops to lie down on the sidewalk halfway through a walk. I describe his nocturnal pacing, the hours of heavy panting. These are signs of pain in dogs, and the vet thinks Widget probably hurts most of the time now. He is on several strong medications.

“He’s a stoic fellow,” the vet says, leaning against the counter in his office. His kindness is impersonal; he sees this every day. “Dogs of this breed usually live about ten to twelve years,” he reminds me. “He’s, what, almost fourteen now? It’s time.”

I ask, not really expecting an answer, “Why won’t he just die of old age?”

The vet smiles. “People always ask that. It’s not going to happen. You have to make the decision.”

He isn’t talking about immortality. He’s talking about suffering.

We commit to not cause harm. To not kill. There are specific injunctions in the dharma about treating animals with lovingkindness. But there’s the rub: What is lovingkindness now? Which is the path of least suffering?

Related: Putting Spot Down

It was both harder and easier the last time. Ten years ago, our old golden retriever ruptured a spinal disc during the night. We woke to find him paralyzed from the chest down. We had no time to prepare, but it was also clear what we had to do: we carried him to the veterinarian’s office, and he was euthanized as we held him. Widget is dying by inches. The pacing and confusion aren’t constant; he has a good appetite. He still likes to walk, even when he sometimes falls along the way. He is surprised by his own weakness, as I can be. He seeks reassurance, as I sometimes do. This is the mystery of how a self unwinds.

Buddhism is a demanding moral practice; it turns over to each person the power to decide what is right to do in any given moment. Buddhist morality is not imposed by an outside authority. Our morality is imposed from within, from our felt sense of what is true. There is no single catechism. Rules for monastic behavior differ by tradition; the precepts for lay people vary in number. A quicksand of possibility—and volumes of near-rabbinical complexity explaining everything, full of self-contradictions.

Buddhism is a demanding moral practice; it turns over to each person the power to decide what is right to do in any given moment.

I have been a Soto Zen Buddhist for more than 35 years, and at times I have wished for the circumscription of clear rules. Much of the Vinaya can be measured: To close the robe up to the neck and down to the wrists when sitting in inhabited areas. Not to stand on tiptoes or on the heels within inhabited areas. Not to make—or have made, or use—beds or chairs of a height greater than 65 centimeters. But all Buddhists are stuck with the simplest directions: Not to lie. Not to steal. These are rather more difficult to measure.

A foundational precept like Do not kill confounds the practitioner the moment it is taken up. It is impossible to live without killing; we would have to stop digesting, walking, and breathing in order to fully keep this precept. (People have tried.) Plenty of Buddhists believe it means, in part, that one can never kill an animal deliberately. To kill a being is to interrupt its path, its karma; this is a serious act. Yet even the most severe practitioners allow a few exceptions when killing may be done—on the condition that one has only the purest and most selfless of intentions, free of malice and desire.

Well. I am not free of these things. I do not have entirely pure intentions. Influenced by Zen, I think in terms of volition, but also responsibility. However I act, I must accept that karmic consequences will follow and be willing to accept those consequences.What will be the results of any one act? I don’t know. I can’t know. I can only accept that karmic effects are many, enduring, and subtle.

We depend on our own felt sense of the truth. And we can spend a lifetime discovering it. A lifetime of considering our selfish, confused, and ignorant motives. The complexity of interrelationship that creates our lives. The consequences.

Our relationship to death and killing is a complicated one. Tell me that we should never interfere with a natural death, and I will tell you some of the many ways we interfere with it all the time. Without much effort, I can imagine situations in which I would kill a person. I voted to legalize assistance in dying in my state. I support reproductive rights, including the right to an abortion. I’m against the death penalty. My intent in each of these conditions is to reduce suffering. A person who holds the opposite views on every point will say the same thing.

And the choice is still right there. You have to make the decision.

How dare I determine the quality of his life? Widget is slow on his walks, but he relishes them. He stands beside my bed in the middle of the night, trembling all over. One day he falls halfway down the stairs, hind legs collapsing in a heap. Now I help him up the porch steps and carry him to the second floor, a task at the edge of my strength. According to traditional dharma, birth as an animal is lower than human birth. There are a lot of complex theological explanations for this, but largely it is because animals have less power, fewer opportunities for true self-governance. In this world of dukkha, or suffering, a life of less power is often a life of more suffering. Widget trusts me. Sometimes this fact looms over everything. What does he trust me to do? Does he trust me not to kill him? Or does he trust me to simply keep him from harm?

He stands in a corner, staring, shaking. I mix his pills in a little peanut butter several times a day. On some nights, I add a tranquilizer. He licks his back foot, over and over. I lift him in and out of the car. He lays his head in my lap, pushing at my hand.

I don’t describe this to convince anyone of anything. I am not trying to justify a choice. The choice is mine—that’s the point.The dharma gives us the burden—and the gift—of responsibility.

My childhood dog died at the age of 10 or so. He rarely saw a vet, and I can’t imagine anyone carrying him upstairs. My parents would have called this “letting nature take its course.” But nature hurts, and we are way past nature now. Widget is entering his fourteenth year because of vaccinations, a special diet, antibiotics, pain medications, and emergency surgery to remove an abscessed tooth. We are in this situation because I’ve taken such good care of him.

If we insist on waiting for the natural outcome, how can we justify having pets at all? Humans have deformed many species for our own needs; domestic dogs are a product of human intervention. To care for a domestic animal is to take on a strange responsibility. To then refuse to relieve an animal’s inevitable suffering is irresponsible in my view. Yes, nature is suffering. The world is dukkha, even as it is nirvana. Half of this world is pain. But the other half is sacrifice and caring and the willingness to do hard things for love.

Relentless honesty is part of our practice. I used the word euthanize earlier. It means mercy killing. I have never liked phrases like “put to sleep” or “put down.” When we euthanize our pets, we are killing them: deliberately, with intent. I would like to avoid engaging with this question at all, but I can’t.

I came across a teaching saying that you should ask an animal if it wants to die. I think Widget said yes recently. Yes to his irreplaceable life, and yes to the end of it.

The post A Life in Her Hands appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

If you were to ask people familiar with Buddhism to identify its two most important wisdom teachings, they’d probably say emptiness and the four noble truths. If you were to ask them further which of the two teachings was more fundamental, they might hesitate, but most of them would probably put emptiness first, on the grounds that the four noble truths deal with a mental problem, while emptiness describes the way things in general are.

It wasn’t always this way. The Buddha himself gave more importance to the four noble truths, and it’s important to understand why.

When he boiled his teaching down to its shortest formulation, he said that he taught just dukkha—suffering and stress—and the cessation of dukkha (Majjhima Nikaya 22; Samyutta Nikaya 22.86). The four noble truths expand on this formulation, defining what suffering is—clinging; how it’s caused—craving and ignorance; the fact that it can be brought to an end by abandoning its cause; and the path of practice that leads to that end. Because part of the path of practice contains desire—the desire, in right effort, to act skillfully so as to go beyond suffering—the four noble truths also expand on one of the Buddha’s main observations about the phenomena of experience: that with the exception of nibbana, they’re all rooted in desire (Anguttara Nikaya 10.58). People aren’t simply passive recipients of their experience. Starting from their desires, they play an active role in shaping it. The strategy implied by the four noble truths is that desire should be retrained so that, instead of causing suffering, it helps act toward suffering’s end.

As for emptiness, the Buddha mentioned it only rarely, but one of his definitions for emptiness (SN 35.85) closely relates it to another teaching that he mentioned a great deal. That’s the teaching popularly known as the three characteristics, and that the Buddha himself called not “characteristics” but “perceptions”: inconstancy, suffering or stress, and not-self (AN 6:102–104). When explaining these perceptions, he taught that if you perceive fabricated things—all things conditioned by acts of intention—as inconstant, you’ll also see that they’re stressful and thus not worth identifying as you or yours.

His purpose in teaching these perceptions was that they be applied to suffering and its cause as a way of fostering dispassion both for the objects  of clinging and craving and for the acts of clinging and craving themselves. In this way, these perceptions were aids in carrying out the duties appropriate to the four noble truths: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation by developing the path. In other words, the four noble truths and their duties supplied the context for the three perceptions and determined their role in the practice.

However, over the centuries, as the three perceptions were renamed the three characteristics, they morphed in two other ways as well. First, they turned into a metaphysical teaching, as the characteristics of what things are: all are devoid of any essence because they’re impermanent, and—since nothing has any essence—there is no self. Second, because the three characteristics were now metaphysical truths, they became the context within which the four noble truths were true.

This switch in roles meant that the four noble truths morphed as well. Whereas the Buddha had identified suffering with all types of clinging—even the act of clinging to the phenomenon of the deathless [amata-dhamma], the unchanging dimension touched at the first taste of awakening —the relationship between clinging and suffering was now explained by the metaphysical fact that all possible objects of clinging were impermanent. To cling to them as if they were permanent has to result in sorrow and disappointment.

As for the ignorance that underlies craving: Whereas the Buddha had defined it as ignorance of the four noble truths, it was now defined as ignorance of the three characteristics. People cling and crave because they don’t realize that nothing has any essence and that there is no self. If they were to realize the truth of these teachings through direct experience—this became the purpose of mindfulness practice—they wouldn’t cling any more and so wouldn’t suffer.

This is how this switch in context, giving priority to the three characteristics over the four noble truths, has come to dominate modern Buddhism. The common pattern is that when modern authors explain right view, which the Buddha equated with seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, the discussion quickly switches from the four noble truths to the three characteristics to explain why clinging leads to suffering. Clinging is no longer directly equated with suffering; instead, it causes suffering because it assumes permanence and essence in impermanent things.

Even teachers who deny the truth of the four noble truths—on the grounds that the principle of impermanence means that no statement can be true everywhere for everyone—still accept the principle of impermanence as a metaphysical truth accurately describing the way things everywhere are.

Popular understandings of the Buddha’s teachings provide an impoverished view of the potentials for happiness.

As these explanations have percolated through modern culture, both among people who identify themselves as Buddhist and among those who don’t, they’ve given rise to three widespread understandings of the Buddha’s teachings on clinging and how it is best avoided in order to stop suffering:

1. Because there is no self, there is no agent. People are essentially on the receiving end of experience, and they suffer because they cling to the idea that they can resist or control change.

2. To cling means to hold on to something with the misunderstanding that it’s permanent. For this reason, as long as you understand that things are impermanent, you can embrace them briefly as they arise in the present moment, and it doesn’t count as clinging. If you embrace experiences in full realization that you’ll have to let them go in order to embrace whatever comes next, you won’t suffer. As long as you’re fully in the moment with no expectations about the future, you’re fine.

These first two understandings are often illustrated with the image of a perfectly fluid dancer, happily responsive to changes in the music decided by the musicians, switching partners with ease.

A 2015 bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, devoted a few pages to the place of Buddhism in world history, in the course of which it illustrated these two understandings of the Buddhist approach to suffering with another image: You’re sitting on the ocean shore, watching the waves come in. If you’re stupid enough to want to cling to “good” waves to make them permanent and to push “bad” waves away, you’ll suffer. But if you accept the fact that waves are just waves, fleeting and incessant, and that there’s no way you can either stop or keep them, you can be at peace as you simply watch, with full acceptance, as they do their thing.

The third widespread understanding about the Buddhist stance on clinging is closely related to the other two:

3. Clinging means holding on to fixed views. If you have set ideas about what’s right or wrong, or about how things should be—even about how the Buddha’s teachings should be interpreted—you’ ll suffer. But if you can let go of your fixed views and simply accept the way things are as the way they have to be, you’ ll be fine.

I recently saw a video clip of the French Buddhologist Dominique Trotignon explaining this principle: when asked by a female interviewer to illustrate the practical applications of the teaching on impermanence in daily life, he looked her in the eye and said, “It means lovers have to accept that their love today will have to express itself differently from their love yesterday.”

It’s been argued that these three understandings of the Buddha’s teachings on clinging don’t promote an attitude of unhealthy passivity, on the grounds that if you’re fully attuned to the present moment without clinging, you can be more freely active and creative in how you respond to change. Still, there’s something inherently defeatist in the picture they offer of life and of the possibilities of happiness that we as human beings can find. They allow for no dimension where we can be free from the unpredictability of waves or the self-righteous infidelity of lovers. It’s only within this narrow range of possibilities that our non-clinging creativity can eke out a little peace.

And when we compare these understandings with the Buddha’s actual teachings on clinging and the end of clinging—returning the three characteristics to their original role as three perceptions, and putting the four noble truths back in their rightful place as the context for the three perceptions—we’ll see not only how much the popular understandings of his teachings deviate from what he actually taught, but also what an impoverished view of the potentials for happiness those popular understandings provide.

To begin with, a lot can be learned from looking at the Pali word for “clinging”: upadana.  In addition to “clinging,” it also means “sustenance” and “the act of taking sustenance”: in other words, food and the act of feeding. The connection between feeding and suffering was one of the Buddha’s most radical and valuable insights, because it is so counterintuitive and at the same time so useful. Ordinarily, we find so much pleasure in the act of feeding, emotionally as well as physically, that we define our sense of identity by the way we feed off the world and the people around us. It took a person of the Buddha’s genius to see the suffering inherent in feeding, and that all suffering is a type of feeding: the fact that we feed off things that change simply adds an extra layer of stress on top of the stress intrinsic in the felt need always to feed.

And just as we feed off physical food without assuming that it’s going to be permanent, clinging to things doesn’t necessarily mean that we assume them to be permanent. We cling whenever we sense that the effort of clinging is repaid by some sort of satisfaction, permanent or not. We cling because there’s some pleasure in the things to which we cling (SN 22.60). When we can’t find what we’d like to cling to, our hunger forces us to take what we can get. For this reason, the act of embracing things in the present moment still counts as clinging. Even if we’re adept at moving from one changing thing to another, it simply means that we’re serial clingers, taking little bites out of every passing thing. We still suffer in the incessant drive to find the next bite to eat.

This is why being constantly mindful of the truth of impermanence isn’t enough to solve the problem of suffering. To really solve it, we need to change our feeding habits—radically—so that we can strengthen the mind to the point where it no longer needs to feed. This requires a two-pronged strategy: (a) seeing the drawbacks of our ordinary ways of feeding; and (b) providing the mind with better food in the meantime until it has outgrown the need to feed on anything at all.

The first prong of the strategy is where the three perceptions come in. First you apply them to things to which you might cling or crave, to see that the benefits of holding on to those things are far outweighed by the drawbacks. You focus on the extent to which the happiness they provide is inconstant, and that because it’s inconstant, the effort to keep it going involves stress. When you see that the happiness isn’t worth the effort of the clinging, you realize that it’s not worthy to be claimed as you or yours. It’s not-self: in other words, not worth claiming as self. In this way, the perception of not-self isn’t a metaphysical assertion. It’s a value judgment: that the effort to define yourself around the act of feeding on those things simply isn’t worth it.

This analysis works, however, only if you have something better to feed on in the interim. Otherwise, you’ll simply go back to your old feeding habits. Nobody ever stopped eating simply through the realization that foods and stomachs are impermanent.

In the practice to gain freedom from suffering, the four noble truths must always come first.

This is where the second prong of the Buddha’s strategy comes in. You develop the path as your interim nourishment, focusing in particular on the pleasure and rapture of right concentration as your alternative source of food (AN 7.63). When the path is fully developed, it opens to another dimension entirely: the deathless, a happiness beyond the reach of space, time, and the six senses.

But because the mind is such a habitual feeder, on its first encounter with the deathless it tries to feed on it—which turns the experience into a phenomenon, and stands in the way of full awakening. This is where the perception of not-self gets employed once more, to counteract this last form of clinging: to the deathless. Even though the deathless in itself is neither stressful nor inconstant, any act of clinging to it has to involve stress. So the perception of not-self has to be applied here as well, to peel away this last obstacle to full awakening beyond all phenomena. When this perception has done its work, “not-self” gets put aside—just as everything else is let go—and the mind, free from hunger, gains full release.

A traditional image for this release, which comes from employing the three perceptions in the context of the four noble truths, is of a person standing on firm ground after taking the raft of the noble eightfold path over a river in flood. Safe from the waves and currents of the river, the person is totally free—even freer than the image can convey. There’s nothing intrinsically hunger-free about standing on a riverbank—it’s more a symbol of relief—but everyone who has experienced what the image is pointing to guarantees that, to the extent that you can call it a place, it’s a place of no hunger and so no need for desire.

If we compare this image with that of the person on the shore of the ocean watching the waves, we can get a sense of how limited the happiness is that’s offered by understanding the four noble truths in the context of the three characteristics, as opposed to the happiness offered by understanding the three perceptions in the context of the four noble truths.

To begin with, the Buddha’s image of crossing the river doesn’t put quotation marks around concepts of good and bad waves in the water. The flood is genuinely bad, and the ultimate goodness in life is when you can truly get beyond it.

Second, unlike the image of sitting on the shore, watching an ocean beyond your control, the Buddha’s image conveys the point that there’s something you can do to get to safety: you have within you the power to follow the duties of the four noble truths and develop the path that will take you to the other side.

Third, to sit watching the ocean waves come ashore is peaceful and desirable only as long as you’re wealthy enough to be at a resort, with someone to bring you food, drink, and shelter on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have to keep searching for these things on your own. And even at the resort, you’re not safe from being swept away by tsunamis and storms.

The image of crossing the river to safety on the farther shore also offers an enlightening perspective on the view that all fixed views should be abandoned. In the classic interpretation of the image, the river stands for the fourfold flood of sensuality, becoming, views, and ignorance, while the raft of the noble eightfold path includes right view. Although it’s true that the raft is abandoned on reaching the further shore, you still have to hold on to it while you’re crossing the river. Otherwise, you’ll be swept downstream.

What’s rarely noticed is the paradox contained in the image. Right view, seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, is part of the raft needed to cross over the flood of views (SN 35.187). As the Buddha saw, it’s the only view that can perform this function, taking you safely all the way across the river and delivering you to the farther shore.

It can take you all the way across because it’s always true and relevant. Cultural changes may affect what we choose to feed on, but the fact of feeding is a constant, as is the connection between suffering and the need to feed. In that sense, right view counts as fixed. It can never be replaced by a more effective understanding of suffering. At the same time, it’s always relevant in that the framework of the four noble truths can be brought to bear on every choice you make at every stage of the practice. Here it differs from the three perceptions, for while the Buddha noted that they’re always true (AN 3.137), they’re not always relevant (MN 136). If, for instance, you perceive the results of all actions, skillful or not, as impermanent, stressful, and not-self, this can dissuade you from making the effort to be skillful in what you do, say, or think.

In addition to being always true and relevant, right view is responsible. It gives reliable guidance on what should and shouldn’t be taken as food for the mind. As the Buddha said, any teaching that can’t give trustworthy guidelines for determining what’s skillful and unskillful to do abdicates a teacher’s primary responsibility to his or her students (AN 3.62). The Buddhologist’s answer to the interviewer exemplifies how irresponsible the teaching to abandon fixed views can be. And the look she gave him showed that she wanted nothing of it.

After taking you responsibly all the way across the river, right view can deliver you to the farther shore because it contains the seeds for its own transcendence, which, as you develop them, deliver you to a transcendent dimension (AN 10.93). Right view does this by focusing on the processes by which the mind creates stress for itself, at the same time encouraging you to abandon those processes when you sense that they’re causing stress. In the beginning, this involves clinging to right view as a tool to pry loose your attachments to gross causes of stress. Over time, as your taste for mental food becomes more refined through its exposure to right concentration, you become sensitive to causes of stress that are more and more subtle. These you abandon as you come to detect them, until eventually there’s nothing else to abandon aside from the path. That’s when right view encourages you to turn the analysis on the act of holding on to and feeding on right view itself. When you can abandon that, there’s nothing left for the mind to cling to, and so it’s freed.

The view that all fixed views should be abandoned, however,  doesn’t contain this dynamic. It provides no grounds for deciding what should and shouldn’t be done. It can itself act as an object of craving and clinging, becoming as fixed as any other view. If you decide to drop this view, for whatever reason, it delivers you nowhere. It offers no guidance on how to choose anything better, and as a result you end up clinging to whatever passing view seems attractive. You’re still stuck in the river, grasping at pieces of flotsam and jetsam as the flood carries you away.

This is why it’s always important to remember that, in the practice to gain freedom from suffering, the four noble truths must always come first. They give guidance for the rest of the path, determining the role and function of all of the Buddha’s other teachings—including emptiness and the three perceptions—so that, instead of lulling you into being satisfied with an exposed spot on the beach, they can take you all the way to the safety of full release, beyond the reach of any possible wave.

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