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.

When the Buddha formulated his first noble truth—the truth of suffering and stress—he didn’t say “Life is suffering,” or “There is suffering.” He said something much more insightful, subtle, and to the point: “Suffering is the five clinging-aggregates.” The aggregates are physical and mental factors—they’re actually activities—from which we create our sense of self. They consist of physical form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. But as the Buddha also explained, the aggregates aren’t the problem. It’s the clinging.

So when he said that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering, he was really saying that all he taught was clinging and the end of clinging. If we want to understand his teachings and get the most out of them, we have to comprehend what clinging is, why it amounts to suffering, and how he recommended bringing it to an end.

Clinging is something we do. And by extension, suffering is something we do: It’s an active, rather than a passive, verb. In fact, the Pali word for clinging—upādāna—has a second meaning: feeding. The first noble truth, then, is saying that we suffer from our feeding habits.

It’s no wonder that many people resist the Buddha’s analysis of suffering. It’s as if he’s placing the blame for their suffering on them, and denying their right to find sustenance from the world. They’d rather hear that the world is making them suffer. They’d prefer a noble truth that places the blame outside.

But the Buddha wasn’t interested in placing blame. Instead, he was interested in empowerment: If you had to wait—or fight—for outside conditions to be just right in order for you to stop suffering, the end of suffering would be forever beyond reach. But because suffering is something you do, you can change what you do and stop suffering. With empowerment comes responsibility: If you’re suffering from your feeding habits, it’s up to you to find a new way to feed, one that strengthens you to the point where you have no more hunger of any kind.

That’s a tall order. As the Buddha’s analysis shows, we suffer precisely because of our strongest attachments. The end of suffering requires that we sacrifice many of the things to which we’re most firmly attached: not only things that we identify as ours, but also many things we identify as us. This is especially difficult because we identify strongly with our own clinging and suffering. 

But then, that’s why this truth of suffering is a noble truth. Suffering itself isn’t noble. The noble part is seeing it in light of the Buddha’s analysis, and deciding to rise above the need to cling and feed.

This noble truth carries a noble duty: Instead of trying to run away from suffering, you have to comprehend it as clinging. Full comprehension means that you contemplate your clingings to the point of ending all passion, aversion, and delusion around them. And because clinging itself is a form of desire and passion, once clinging is fully comprehended, it ends.

A first step in comprehending clinging is to identify the forms it takes. The Buddha lists four:

• Sensuality-clinging: any passion and desire to find pleasure in fantasizing and planning sensual pleasures.
• View-clinging: passion and desire to develop views for how the world is structured and how it works.
• Habit-and-practice-clinging: passion and desire for ideas that tell you how you should act in the world.
• Doctrine-of-self-clinging: passion and desire for ways of defining who or what you are.

This list may sound arbitrary and abstract, but in fact the Buddha is talking about some very basic functions of the mind. 

• Sensuality-clinging is all about what you want in terms of sensuality. 
• View-clinging is all about your ideas about the world, about what is and how it works.
• Habit-and-practice-clinging covers your ideas of how you have to act in the world to get what you want. It’s all about your ideas of what you should do. 
• And doctrine-of-self-clinging is all about your sense of yourself as (1) an agent, negotiating the way the world works and doing what needs to be done to find pleasure in order to feed (2) the consumer who will enjoy those pleasures once they’re attained. These two functions of the self are your basic set of strategies for finding happiness.

The first three types of clinging define the arena in which your self acts and searches for happiness. The balance of power among the three will vary from person to person, and even within an individual from one moment to the next. 

Imagine, for instance, that you’re a hedonist who wants nothing more than to fulfill your sexual fantasies without constraint. You might believe the world is composed of nothing but matter with no moral laws, and that the only thing you should do is pursue pleasure wherever you find it. This would be a case of sensuality-clinging dictating your view of the world as well as your habits and practices. 

On the other hand, if you believe that your dignity as a human being lies in your ability to choose between right and wrong, you’ll be inclined to believe that there is a moral law behind the universe that rewards good choices. This would be a case where the shoulds of habit-and-practice-clinging dictate your view of what is and what your attitude toward sensual wants should be.

There are many cases where people change their worldview to fit in with their desires, just as there are cases where their wants are subjugated under their shoulds and fixed ideas of what is. Modern psychology has detailed the suffering that comes from precisely this sort of conflict. Freud, for instance, described it as the ego’s constant need to negotiate among the shoulds of the super-ego, the wants of the id, and the what is of the reality principle. Jung saw it as the clash between the shoulds and wants of the individual ego and those of the larger unconscious. However you analyze it, this conflict is a common feature of the human condition.

Still, even though the first three types of clinging define the arena in which the self functions, the Buddha identified doctrine-of-self-clinging as the most basic clinging of all. As he stated, only in a teaching where this type of clinging is comprehended can people reach awakening (Majjhima Nikaya 11). That’s because your sense of who you are explains why you’re invested in seeing the world a certain way and in believing that certain things should be done in order to attain what you want. Without your desire to gain pleasure for yourself, views of the world or of how you should act wouldn’t have much hold on the mind. 

Of all the different forms of clinging, doctrine-of-self-clinging is the one on which the Buddha focused the most attention for explaining how clinging gets fixated on the five aggregates. According to him, you can identify the self either as identical with any of the aggregates, as possessing any of the aggregates, as containing any of the aggregates, or as existing within any of the aggregates. These four possibilities multiplied by five aggregates give twenty possible self-identity views to which you might cling (Samyutta Nikaya 22.1). These twenty alternatives cover every possible way of defining yourself, from a separate self, identified with your body, to a cosmic, interconnected self that contains everything, physical and mental, within it.

In every alternative, your sense of self can play either of its roles—as agent or as consumer—so you can suffer when clinging to your self no matter how you define it. The self-as-consumer, even though it enjoys feeding, is constantly hungry. As the Buddha said, even if it rained gold coins, that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy one person’s sensual desires. This means that the self-as-agent has to be constantly at work—negotiating among wants and shoulds and trying to gain a measure of control over the way things are—to assuage the hunger of the consumer, with never a moment’s rest. 

Because doctrine-of-self clinging is basic to all forms of clinging, meditators often focus on it as the central problem, to the exclusion of the other three. You can’t uproot your sense of self, however, without simultaneously prying loose the other forms of clinging, too. The self’s identity is linked to its strategies for navigating the world, which are tied to its views about what is and what should be done. 

You see this connection most clearly when you enter into a different culture, or when your own society undergoes radical change. The world is no longer what it used to be, the skills that used to get results may not apply, and you find that your very identity gets called into question. To survive, you need to construct a new self by adapting old skills and developing new ones for negotiating the new arena in which you act. The pandemic has brought this lesson home in spades. The world is a new place, placing new restrictions on us as agents and consumers. We’ve had to take on new identities based on what we see as the new rules about what should and shouldn’t be done even in the simple act of going out the front door. We’ve also watched as other people, seeing the world differently, adopt different identities, and as the battle over who’s right and who’s wrong has brought even further changes in who we are. But from the Buddha’s point of view, even if the pandemic ended and everyone’s relationships became harmonious, our resulting self-identities would still have to suffer from their incessant need to feed.

So—given that the roots of the self are entangled in its wants, its worldviews, and its ideas of what should be done—if you want to uproot your sense (or senses) of self, you also have to tackle the other three types of clinging: your attitude toward sensuality and your sense of how you should act, given your views on how the world works.

Because desire is the motive force for all conditioned things, the first order of business in putting an end to suffering is to see the end of clinging as a desirable goal. And because sensuality-clinging plays no role on the path to the end of clinging, you have to get to the point where you can see the pleasure of sensuality as an inferior goal and freedom from sensuality as potentially desirable.

This goes against some firmly ingrained habits. After all, sensual pleasure is, for most of us, our prime go-to source of comfort and well-being. Even the Buddha himself said that when he realized he would have to abandon sensuality to progress on the path, his heart didn’t leap up at the prospect (Anguttara Nikaya 9.41). Only when he admitted the drawbacks of sensuality, and saw renunciation as freedom and rest, did he actually get to work on abandoning his fascination with sensuality.

The way he did this is suggested by the way he taught other people to do it. There were many cases where he wanted to teach the four noble truths to his listeners, but because they didn’t yet see the rewards of renunciation, they wouldn’t fully benefit from hearing those truths. So he first prepared his listeners’ minds with what he called a graduated talk. As a beginning step, he described the joys of giving, then the joys of being virtuous, and then the pleasurable rewards that come from both generosity and virtue in the sensual heavens—rewards that far outweigh the rewards in this life (Majjhima Nikaya 56). 

Once his listeners were attracted to the idea that the best way to attain sensual bliss was through generosity and virtue, he turned the tables on them by pointing out the drawbacks even of heavenly sensual pleasures: As you enjoy those pleasures, you get addicted and heedless, abandoning the good practices that got you to heaven to begin with. It’s as if samsara were a sick joke. You work hard, developing good qualities of mind to gain long-lasting sensual pleasures, but then the act of enjoying those pleasures has a corrosive effect on the good qualities that produced them. The mind deteriorates as it grows accustomed to having its wants all met, that deterioration eventually causes it to fall, and you’re back where you started—if not somewhere worse.

When this realization inspires a sense of dismay, you begin to appreciate the idea that the only true happiness would lie in getting out of this trap. That’s when you’re ready for the four noble truths.

Notice what the Buddha is doing in the course of giving this talk. To pry you away from your attachment to sensuality, he’s providing you with a way of viewing the world in which a certain course of action—renunciation of sensuality—is an obvious should because it leads to your long-term welfare and happiness, with “you” defined in terms of multiple lifetimes. In other words, he’s recommending new objects of view-clinging and doctrine-of-self-clinging that will help get you started on the habits and practices of the path. As the talk explains, we live in a world where good actions are rewarded, both in this lifetime and in future ones. We ourselves are beings who will survive death—as we have already survived death many times—to enjoy the results of our actions. The talk describes the rewards and limitations of our actions in leading to sensual pleasure now and into the distant future, while the four noble truths explain a path of action that leads away from the incessant round of lifetimes of sensual pleasure alternating with pain and toward a happiness totally unconditioned.

The noble truths also propose an interim pleasure—the pleasure, rapture, and equanimity of right concentration, the last factor in the fourth noble truth—that will form an alternative object of desire to replace your desires for sensuality. This non-sensual pleasure will be your food along the way, so that you’re not tempted to go back to sensuality even as you understand its drawbacks. In effect, he’s offering a skillful type of habit-and-practice clinging to replace sensuality-clinging as your source of inner food. 

This means that the path to the end of clinging uses interim versions of three kinds of clinging: view-clinging, habit-and-practice-clinging, and doctrine-of-self-clinging. You hold on to the raft composed of these three forms of clinging until you get to the further shore. Only then do you let them go.

Of the three, habit-and-practice-clinging is the most pivotal. After all, the path to the end of clinging is a path of action—what the Buddha called the kamma (karma) that puts an end to kamma—which is why his teachings go into great detail on the habits and practices of virtue, concentration, and discernment that should be developed to form the path. However, to believe that such a path could actually work, you need a view about the world in which actions can be freely chosen and have the power to transcend the endless round of death and rebirth. This is why right views about kamma and rebirth also form part of the path. 

At the same time, you need to have a sense that you, as an agent, are capable of following the path, and that you, as a consumer, will benefit from doing so. This is why, as part of his strategy for motivating you to engage in the path factor of right effort, the Buddha provided many teachings to encourage a healthy sense of self, saying that the self is its own mainstay, that it’s responsible for its actions, that it’s capable of mastering the path, and that it will benefit from doing so.

It’s worth noting that even though the early teachings are very detailed in their instructions as to what should and shouldn’t be done, the worldviews and self-views they provide in support of these instructions are only sketches. Many issues were at play in the worldviews actively discussed during the Buddha’s time, but he focused only on views related to the nature of action, its powers, and the patterns of causality by which it brings about results. Karma and rebirth, for instance, were hotly debated by his contemporaries, so he had to take a position on those issues to justify the path of practice he taught. The size and age of the cosmos were also hot topics, but because they had no bearing on the power of action, the Buddha put those topics aside.

Similarly with issues of the self: Other philosophical schools debated the question of how best to define the self, but the Buddha noted that to define yourself was to limit yourself, so he refused to answer questions about what the self was—or even whether it existed. As he said, questions of that sort weren’t worthy of attention (Majjhima Nikaya 2). All he was concerned about was your perception of self: responsible for your actions, competent to follow the path, and able to benefit from doing so. That’s all.

An example of how the Buddha has you use clinging as motivation on the path is related to his five-step program for dealing with unskillful thoughts that will pull you away from the practice. When a sensual desire or a wrong view about action threatens to pull you out of concentration, he recommends that you look at the thought in question as an action, a type of clinging, and then follow four steps: observing (1) the origin of the clinging—what causes it to arise; (2) its falling away; (3) its allure; and (4) its drawbacks. When you see that the allure is far outweighed by the drawbacks, you develop dispassion for it, which is step (5): escape.

The crucial step here is to develop an acute sensitivity to the drawbacks. This is where the Buddha recommends analyzing the thought in question as an action and applying three perceptions to it: It’s inconstant and stressful, so why perceive it as you or belonging to you? You should actually perceive it as not-self.

What’s interesting here is that the motivation for applying this last perception is that you will benefit from it. In the passages where the Buddha has you reflect on the rewards of applying this perception even toward the last stages of the practice, the reflections are phrased in terms of “I” and “mine”: “My my-making will be stopped. I’ll be endowed with uncommon knowledge. (AN 6:104)” Or when he told the monks to abandon attachment to what was not theirs, he phrased the motivation this way: “Whatever’s not yours: Let go of it. Your letting go of it will be for your long-term happiness and benefit.” (SN 35:101) So in these cases, even with the perception of not-self, the Buddha is using a sense of “you” as motivation to keep you focused on following the habits and practices of the path.

Given that all clinging is suffering, even skillful forms of clinging ultimately have to be transcended if we want suffering to end. To do that, we have to develop a skillful set of views that, once the path is fully developed, will direct us to abandon the path as well. Here again, the Buddha recommends taking his five-step approach and focusing on the skillful habit-and-practice-clinging that lies at the heart of the path: the practice of right concentration. Even the four jhanas or states of meditative absorption that comprise right concentration, he warns us, are composed of the five aggregates. To investigate them, and to fully let go of our clinging to these pleasurable states, he offers the following instructions: 

First, break down your state of concentration into the five aggregates that comprise it. Then, apply the three perceptions to those aggregates, to see that they are inconstant, stressful, and not-self. As you develop dispassion even for the subtle pleasure and equanimity of concentration—because you apprehend the stress that goes into creating or fabricating them—you incline the mind to the unfabricated. Then, as fabrications fall away and you discern the deathless, be careful not to cling even to that act of discernment. As you develop dispassion for it, your dispassion becomes all-encompassing. There’s nothing left to cling to, and you can reach total unbinding. 

This is how our feeding habits come to an end: not because we force ourselves to stop eating, but because we’ve arrived at a state where there’s no need to feed: the ultimate release, free from hunger, at last.

♦

Edited by Mary Talbot

The post The Clinging to End All Clinging appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Suffering is clearly evident in our current times. Zen teacher Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt will show how the four noble truths apply to adversity and injustice around the world today, focusing on how we can address harm and reconnect with our innate wholeness.

Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt is a Soto Zen teacher in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Born into a Buddhist family in Vietnam, she has trained at monasteries in the US, Japan, and Vietnam. Rev. Liên teaches at Access to Zen, the San Francisco Zen Center, East Bay Meditation Center, and other sanghas. You can find her at accesstozen.org.

Join Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt in Sprit Rock’s upcoming course The Dharma of Being Anti-Racist, April 28 – August 18.

The post Engaging with the Truths of Suffering 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.

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The Buddha’s journey from upper-class royalty to no-class enlightenment had enough twists and turns to fill a saga. Each stage of his life contains lessons on freeing ourselves from suffering applicable to our own lives here and now. Zen Buddhist priest Gesshin Greenwood shows us how the characters in the Buddha’s story illuminate aspects of our psychological lives: from the Buddha’s father’s attempts to shield his son from life’s suffering, to Mara’s efforts to sabotage the Buddha with delusion, to Ananda’s dedication to convince the Buddha to accept women into his community. 

Gesshin Greenwood is an ordained Soto Zen priest completing her masters in Counseling Psychology and author of Bow First, Ask Questions Later: Ordination, Love, and Monastic Zen in Japan and the upcoming Just Enough: Vegan Recipes and Stories from Japan’s Buddhist Temples (June 2019.)

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The four noble truths—that existence is suffering (duhkha), that suffering has an origin (samudaya), that there is a state of the cessation (nirodha) of suffering, and that there is a path (marga) leading to that state of cessation—is the most famous of all Buddhist doctrines. It is the first thing that the Buddha taught—the content of his first sermon, or in the language of the tradition, what he explained when he first “turned the wheel of the dharma” (dharmacakrapravartana)—after concluding that the enlightenment he experienced under the Bodhi tree could be comprehended by others.

The “four noble truths” is the one phrase that most people know from Buddhism, the one thing they remember from their “Introduction to World Religions” course. Unfortunately, it is a mistranslation.

Related: 10 Misconceptions about Buddhism 

The key term is “noble.” The original Sanskrit term arya—adopted by the Nazis as the centerpiece of their racist ideology—was in ancient India an ethnic self-designation used by inhabitants of north India (whether they were invaders, migrants, or natives remains a topic of scholarly debate) to distinguish themselves from other inhabitants of the region. The Buddha reinterpreted the word, which means “noble” or “superior,” from an ethnic designation into a spiritual one, referring to those with an insight into reality superior to that of ordinary people.

It appears that arya became a technical term early on in the tradition, referring specifically to four stages on the path to nirvana, or more accurately, to those who have reached those stages: the four noble persons (aryapudgala).

The first of the four are the stream-enterers (srotaapanna), those who have had an initial insight into the nature of reality, such that they have destroyed all causes for future rebirth as an animal, ghost, or in the hells, and who are destined to enter nirvana in seven lifetimes or less.

The second are the once-returners (sakrdagamin), who have deepened that insight, such that they will only be reborn in our world, the sensuous realm (kamadhatu), once more.

The third are the never-returners (anagamin), who have deepened that insight further so that they will never be reborn in our world again, but will achieve nirvana in “pure abodes” (suddhavasa) at the upper reaches of the heavens of the realm of subtle materiality (rupadhatu).

The fourth type of noble person are the worthy ones or arhats, who have destroyed all causes for future rebirth and will never be reborn again, entering nirvana at death. The Buddha passed through all four of these stages on the night of his enlightenment, becoming an arhat.

Thus, the term that we know as the “four noble truths” should really be translated as the “four truths for the [spiritually] noble.” The truths themselves are not noble; the people who understand them are. And it is the understanding of these truths that makes them noble. Another translation might be the “four ennobling truths.”

Related: What’s So Noble About the Four Noble Truths? 

There is an important teaching in this term: the four truths are not true for everyone. Anyone who has not achieved at least the level of stream-enterer is called an “ordinary person” or “common being” (prthagjana)—sometimes also called bala, meaning “childish” or “foolish.” We ordinary persons are foolish because we don’t know the truth.

Specifically, we don’t know that existence itself is suffering, that suffering has an origin, that suffering can be brought to an end, and that there is a path to that state of cessation. We may know it intellectually, we might know it well enough to list it correctly on the midterm, but this does not make us noble.

Only the person who has direct insight into the four truths is noble. And it is only for such people that the four truths are, in fact, true.

[This story was first published in 2014]

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When people ask me this question, they often seem a little embarrassed, for fear that it’s impolite or too obvious, but it’s well worth asking. After all, the end of suffering and the path to its end might be noble, but what’s noble about suffering and the craving that causes it? If anything, by attributing all suffering to craving, the truths seem to deny the possibility of noble suffering entirely. And what does it mean for a truth to be “noble” anyway?

A good place to start is with the Pali term for noble truth: ariya-sacca. This is a compound of two words: ariya (noble) and sacca (truth). The first word in any Pali compound, because it’s stripped of its case ending, can function in many ways. This is one of the reasons that people fluent in the language liked to use compounds: they can contain many layers of meaning that reward the person who tries to dig them out. Ancient commentators specialized in the game of digging out these layers, and ariya-sacca is one of the compounds in which they liked to dig. Among the meanings they found in the word ariya is that the truths are ennobling because they bring ordinary people to a noble attainment, a happiness that, because it’s unconditioned, is reliable and blameless. The truths are also of the nobles, in that noble—i.e., awakened—people have proven to themselves that these truths are true, and that they’re the most important truths to teach to others. The commentators who dug out these meanings didn’t see this sort of analysis as denying the fact that the truths themselves were noble. They simply saw it as adding resonance to the idea of their nobility.

Related: Hang On to Your Ego

For instance, even though the truths are true for noble people, they’re not true only for noble people. They’re classed as right view, part of the path that will take you from your not-yet-noble condition and lead you to a noble attainment. In other words, they’re specifically for people who aren’t yet fully awakened. They’re part of the raft that takes you across the river. Once you’re on the other side, you no longer need the raft. From that point on, the path of those who are fully awakened, like that of birds through space, can’t be traced (Dhammapada 92–93). As the Buddha said, what he learned in the course of his awakening was plentiful like the leaves in the forest; what he taught—the four noble truths—is only a handful of leaves (Samyutta Nikaya 56:31).

And the Buddha didn’t save these truths only for those who are on the verge of awakening. Once, when quizzed by a newcomer to the dhamma named Gandhabhaka, he taught the origination and cessation of suffering by using examples from Gandhabhaka’s daily life: Why did he suffer over the death or imprisonment of some people and not of others? Gandhabhaka immediately grasped the basic principle—that all suffering comes from desire—and proceeded to apply those examples to understand the anxiety he felt over his son’s safety (Samyutta Nikaya 42:11). The text doesn’t say that Gandhabhaka gained awakening, but he did see—at least to some extent—how the noble truths are true. If he had taken these truths as a guide to his life, he would have found that they’re ennobling as well.

But what makes the truths themselves noble? Among the various meanings of the word “noble,” my dictionary lists “preeminent,” “highly virtuous,” and “deserving respect.” The noble truths are noble in all three of these senses.

The first sense—preeminence—relates to that handful of leaves. Of all the things the Buddha learned in his awakening, the only lessons that would be beneficial and worth teaching in leading others to awakening were contained in these four truths. As Sariputta once said, all skillful dhammas fall under the four noble truths in the same way that the footprints of all land animals can fit into the footprint of the elephant (Majjhima Nikaya 28). These truths not only provide the framework for understanding everything else that is skillful, but also give directions for how to deal skillfully with whatever arises in experience. Suffering is to be comprehended, its cause is to be abandoned, its cessation is to be realized, and the path to its cessation is to be developed. In this way, the four noble truths is the Buddha’s most overarching teaching—the teaching that puts every experience in its place and tells you the most skillful way to shape your experiences into a path.

This is what the Buddha meant when he stated that he taught suffering and the end of suffering. He did, of course, in his many years of teaching, touch on other topics as well, but he always did so within the overarching framework of how those topics related to an understanding of suffering and its end. Even when he dealt with such far-ranging topics as how to make a marriage work or how to be reborn as a deva or naga, he treated them under the framework of karma, the principle underlying the fact that our actions can either cause suffering or end it. In other words, he was illustrating the principles of right view and showing both how far those principles extend and how useful they can be. If he was asked to take a position on a topic that would get in the way of gaining right view—as when he was asked to take a stand on whether a fully awakened being does or does not exist after death (Samyutta Nikaya 22:86)—he’d refuse to answer on the grounds that doing so lay outside the range of what he taught. For him, any questions that didn’t fall under these truths were a waste of time.

Related: The Buddha’s Original Teachings on Mindfulness

The noble truths are also noble in the second sense of the word: highly virtuous. This is because the act of seeing yourself in terms of these truths is a noble act. Take the first two truths as an example. The first isn’t just “suffering”; it’s the truth that suffering boils down to clinging to the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness) around which we define our sense of who we are. Seeing your sense of self as inherently stressful provides some distance from it. Instead of simply following the dictates of what you think you are, you can step back from those dictates and see how they can be harmful. In this way, you begin to comprehend them, and in gaining this objectivity, you’re in a better position to act in less selfish ways. The willingness to view your sense of self in line with the first noble truth is a virtuous act in and of itself.

The same point holds for the second noble truth. It’s not just “craving.” It’s the truth that craving is the cause of suffering. To view your cravings in this way gives you some space and puts you in a position where, once you see the stress and suffering they cause, it’s easier to drop them.

Finally, the noble truths are noble in the sense that they deserve respect. This, too, relates to that handful of leaves. Of all the amazing things the Buddha could have reported from his awakening, this is what he chose to focus on: what exactly suffering is, how it’s caused, and how to put an end to it. This indicates that these truths deserve to be placed before all others.

All too often, the world tells us to ignore the suffering entailed in our clinging and caused by our craving, to regard these things as trivial and irrelevant. Our greed, aversion, and delusion are all too happy to ignore these truths in pursuit of their own agendas, the truths that hold more value for them. They prefer that craving be given free rein.

The four noble truths, however, focus our attention right at the suffering we’re causing ourselves and others, and highlight that suffering as the paramount problem in our lives. They force us to make a choice: Which are we going to respect more—our cravings or the truths of how suffering arises and how it can be brought to an end?

[This story was first published in 2013] 

The post What’s Noble about the Four Noble Truths? 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.

The post The Far Shore appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Anyone who has read even the most introductory Buddhist books will have come across the phrase “the four noble truths,” referring to the tenets that form the bedrock of the Buddhist worldview. These four truths are generally understood as the historical Buddha’s realization that (1) life inevitably contains suffering; (2) this suffering is caused by craving and clinging to impermanent things; (3) suffering can be ended by cutting the roots of craving; and (4) this can be achieved by following a path outlined by the Buddha. But is the translation of “noble truths”—a phrase that is thoroughly embedded in Western Buddhist discourse—correct? And what would it mean for our practice if it weren’t?

In the following conversation, three of the five core teachers of Bodhi College, an online educational center focusing on a secular understanding of the dharma, explain why they say these truths are due for a fresh translation and reassessment. 

Stephen Batchelor (SB): I have a problem with using the word “truth” at all for what’s usually translated as “the four noble truths.” We’d be much better off if we abandoned that language. As soon as we bring up this notion of truth, we’ve framed everything within the idea that there is some reality we have to understand: truths are things that you understand or you don’t understand. But I don’t think that’s what the Buddha is trying to do here. He’s actually asking us to embrace suffering; he’s asking us to let go of craving; he’s asking us to see the stopping of craving; and he’s asking us to cultivate a way of life, which is the way it’s explained in his first sermon, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (“The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma”). And you can say all of that without any reference to the word “truth” at all.

“Noble truth” is very possibly a kind of Buddhist rhetoric. All religions claim to teach noble truths; in a sense, it’s a given in this kind of discourse. What would happen if we stopped using that language? I think it would free us up to give primacy to the practices.

Christina Feldman (CF): Well, actually, I would agree.

SB: I thought you’d agree.

CF: [Laughs.] I am uneasy with the whole phrase “four noble truths.” First, these are interactive understandings, not separate, fragmented pieces where we can choose one or the other. Second, as soon as we use the word “truth,” we get into an absolute way of thinking instead of living these truths as a dynamic process that is happening moment to moment. They are something that we’re actually invited to see and to understand for ourselves.

These “truths” are not observances; they’re not something historical, like “twenty-six hundred years ago the Buddha invented the four noble truths.” What the Buddha was describing was the process of getting into optional difficulties and pain and distress that could come to an end. So these are liberating investigations, which are only valuable if you can take them into your own experience and see if they are true for you. This kind of framework is a primary way of learning to be honest with ourselves and with what’s going on in our lives. Instead of being mystified and bewildered and saying, “How did I end up here in this awful anguish?” we can actually come to understand exactly how we ended up there, and that understanding is, of course, the key to not reentering those cycles of distress.

Akincano M. Weber (AW): We also have good reasons to believe from the very old traditions that the four noble truths have always been understood in different ways. It’s very interesting to look at how the early commentators actually related to the term. In the commentary to the Digha Nikaya (“The Collection of Long Discourses”) and Anguttara Nikaya (“The Collection of Numerical Discourses”), two of the collections of texts from the Pali canon, for instance, the term is glossed as “these truths are the truths of the noble ones.” So our oldest canonical references to these teachings make it clear that “noble truth” is probably a misnomer, and yet it became the term with which most people are familiar.

The doubt about the exact doctrinal content of the term ariyasatya in Sanskrit or ariyasaccani in Pali has been there for a hundred years, from the Russian 19th-century Indologist Fyodor Stcherbatsky up to the present-day British philologist K. R. Norman, who has looked at this topic very carefully. The conclusion is fairly clear: anyone who knows the languages will know that the term can be broken down in a number of ways, and “noble truth” is likely the least useful way to do it. Probably the best and closest translation is something like “engaging with these truths, practices, or themes is an ennobling pursuit.”

“As soon as we use the word ‘truth,’ we get into an absolute way of thinking instead of living these truths as a dynamic process that is happening moment to moment.”

SB: K. R. Norman also argues that in the earliest version of the presentation, the term ariyasaccani wasn’t there; it was stitched in at a later point. I see the addition of the term as a reflection of how the dharma, over a period of time—although we don’t know exactly what that period is—mutated, how what started out as a way of life or a practical philosophy became more and more aligned with a form of an Indian religion. I think what might have happened is that as the dharma began to evolve into Buddhism, quite understandably it then had to deal with the “competition”: the Brahmins and the Jains and the Ajivikas and the other schools of ancient India, each of whom claimed that what they taught was the truth and that their truth was truer than the other guy’s truth. And so the Buddhists, I think, got drawn into the game of making truth claims in order to have the status of being a respectable religion alongside the others, so it would have more credibility in the eyes of the people, the kings, and the various ascetics who were around at that time.

CF: It’s important to remember that we’re not endeavoring to reframe this very central teaching in order to be clever or to somehow imagine that the Buddha didn’t actually teach these things. What we’re endeavoring to do is to bring this liberating teaching into something that is an ongoing question, that question being, what is it that is ennobling?

Now, it’s curious: in English, we would hardly ever use the word “ennobling”; it doesn’t have any meaning for most people. I think that the Buddha was really asking: What is it that brings dignity to your life? What is it that allows you to live without regret? What is a way of living that is imbued with respect and blamelessness? What is a way of living where you’re no longer hostage to the world of conditions? What is a way of living where your mind is actually a friend rather than something that torments you?

It’s important to remember that the Buddha, as much as he was a contemplative, was also a social activist. He was not just concerned with personal development and freedom. He was also concerned with the kind of world that people lived in and created together, either through ignorance and confusion or through respect and integrity. So my own sense is that the teaching of these ennobling understandings is not just about personal well-being. They continually ask this question of us, which is of grave immediacy: What is it that ennobles our lives, which we can then communicate to the world around us through the ways we engage with that world?

SB: That points to how the Buddha’s vision was centrally ethical. I’m not referencing the moral precepts here and so on; by ethical I mean leading a way of life in which you try to become the kind of person you aspire to be and try to create a world that you aspire to live in.

My problem is that the word “truth” gets in the way of that. In the Sutta Nipata, one of the oldest collections we find in Pali, there’s a line where the Buddha actually says that he does not claim truth. He says that “This is true” is what fools say to one another. So he’s very skeptical of truth claims in these earliest texts, because they lead inevitably to quarrels, which is another one of the things the early scriptures are constantly warning us against: getting drawn into disputes.

CF: The Buddha is constantly identifying this world of division and conflict and how it comes into being, which is why many of the discourses are framed as a conversation between two people who are quarreling or between the Buddha and someone who is trying to quarrel with him. Much of the time those quarrels are created through identification with view. “I am right. And if I am right, you are wrong.”There’s a very fine line between what we call a truth and a view: the latter is used to create a sense of position and a self that in turn becomes the foundation for more suffering.

SB: Again, as long as you’re using the word “truth,” you’re going to be just a whisker away from having a dogmatic view. If we take, for example, the second noble truth as it is usually translated—that “craving is the origin of suffering”—to me that is a metaphysical statement. You’re making a very generalized claim about the nature of reality, and so immediately people get drawn into the discussion: Well, is that really true? What about this? What about that? And down you go into the rabbit hole of theology. Whereas if you frame it as a task, the challenge is: how do I let go of craving? Then you are setting up a whole different doorway to the thoughts and the discussions that follow. Your discussion inevitably will be pragmatic. It won’t be, “Is this true? Is this false? Is this right? Is this wrong?” but, “How do you get it done?”

It’s like the very famous example of the person who is wounded by a poisoned arrow and his friends want to take it out, but he won’t let them until he knows the name of the man who shot it and so on. And the Buddha says that he doesn’t teach all of these metaphysical views, that all he’s interested in is “how do you get the arrow out?” How do you let go of craving? That’s all that matters. The rest is speculation.

AW: But there’s a slight tension in there. If you look at the framing of the second truth in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, it states literally that craving is the origin of suffering. But if you look at other teachings, the problem doesn’t seem to be craving primarily, but ignorance. Buddhist traditions have played that against each other for many centuries, whether the major problem is a lack of understanding, so that all it takes is to open your eyes and wake up from the sleep of not knowing; or whether the solution is to gradually wean yourself from bad habits and come to create wholesome activity on the basis of an attitude to the world that is guided by the four forms of empathy.

Anyway, if I am pressed to state something about the teaching on the four “truths,” I’ve been greatly inspired by the English monk Nanavira Thera, who says in a letter to one of his supporters in the mid-’60s that he understands the four truths by way of an Alice in Wonderland analogy. Alice doesn’t have a bottle that describes its contents. She finds a bottle that tells her what she should do with the contents—“Drink me”—and then things happen: she shrinks and grows and so on. In the Buddhist application of the analogy, the label on the first truth says, “Understand me.” On the second of the truths, the label says, “Give me up.” On the third bottle, it says, “Realize me,” and on the fourth bottle it says, “Develop me.” So if we boil down the teaching of these four truths, they are four different calls to action.

And the first one is not to believe me; it’s to understand me.

SB: That’s the point, I think. See, with the whole issue of craving, it’s so easy to get into questions of where it comes from or what it produces, all of which can be very insightful, but none of which can really address the primary experience of what it’s like as a sentient creature to crave, to grasp, to fear, to hate. What is that actually doing to me psychosomatically, and how do I work with that? It’s all very well to say, “Give me up; let go.” How the hell do you do that?

In other words, if we start thinking more in terms of tasks than truths, that makes it all eminently practical. In a sense, at that point, the broader truth claims become irrelevant. Does it really matter whether craving causes suffering or not? Well, that’s interesting, but the real practice, the real challenge, is to enter into a relationship with my craving in which I transform that experience from one that traps me and binds me and keeps me stuck into one that makes me free.

♦

Continue studying with Stephen Batchelor, Christina Feldman, John Peacock, and Akincano Weber in The Four Noble Truths, a six-part online course available through Tricycle Online Courses.

The post Understand, Realize, Give Up, Develop appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.