Tag: suffering

The Second Noble Truth

Posted on by Lama Lekshe

The Second Noble truth is that suffering has a cause. It doesn’t just randomly arise. We’re quite familiar with the notion that if we understand the cause of something, we can usually find a remedy, a cure, a fix—or at least a leverage point for progress. About this truth, the Buddha said, if you want to be free, “This origin of suffering…should be abandoned.”

The second noble truth identifies the causes of our suffering as craving or desire. And what is it that we most desire? That things be different than they are. Even things that we love just as they are in the moment, we wish to be permanent, which they can’t. Just can’t. Impossible. It’s an anti-truth. And when we want things to be a way that they can’t, we suffer. You can’t ask a dog to be a cat and be happy with the result, because it’s anti-truth.

Craving produces a kind of restlessness. Human beings must ‘go’ and ‘do’ ceaselessly, all in the name of hoping to create a perfect existence. All in the name of desire. We want more and better in an escalating arc of wishful thinking and we simply can’t rest from this never-ending quest.

If we look a little more deeply into the mechanism of desire and craving, we find the most fundamental obsession of human life. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it self-cherishing: the prevailing narrative is “I am more important, more essential, more valuable and more special than everyone else.” If this sounds absurd, consider how much of your life energy to date has been spent seeking your own well-being and how much has been spent on ensuring the well-being of the other 7.6 billion people in the world. (Not to mention the animals, and any beings of which we might be unaware.)

Relinquishing desire might sound like a plausible cure, but upon further examination, it might also sound nearly impossible. Where do I start? Can’t I desire anything any more? Can’t I cling stubbornly to even one thing? Of course you can. You can decide how much you want to suffer—and then cling to that much. Your life, your call.

But don’t confuse joy and love for clinging. They are not, necessarily. Think of how you have enjoyed a sunset and then happily watched it fade. No craving there. Love like that. Drink your coffee like that. Enjoy the beauty of youth like that. No problem. No suffering.

From the first two Noble Truths, we know that suffering is pervasive for human beings. And we know that what separates obsessive craving from simple joy is a kind of sticky clinging, instead of contentedness with things as they are. And we know that self-cherishing, the compulsion of I, Me and Mine as the most important thing in the universe is the root of the craving.

That root is the cause of oppression, racism, hatred and so much more. It is so poisonous that the one who perpetrates those things is the first victim of their own self-centeredness.

Now what? The Third Noble Truth was the answer to the Buddha’s own question, “Can the craving cease?” Read on.

The First Noble Truth

Posted on by Lama Lekshe
Shariputra, one of the main disciples of the Buddha.

The first teaching of the Buddha is called “The Four Noble Truths”. These were his insights about human existence. Inside these four sentences are all the dharma. Or as my teacher, Lama Michael used to day, “Inside any of the dharma is all of the dharma.”

The First Noble Truth is the truth suffering; the fact of suffering. Grim, isn’t it? But even understanding this teaching is to take a step away from suffering, towards liberation or freedom. Abou this truth, the Buddha said, “This suffering, as a noble truth, should be fully understood.”

The Pali word ‘dukkha‘ is usually translated as suffering, stress, pain, unhappiness or dissatisfaction.

What is dukkha? The Buddha taught (in the winding speech pattern of the time)

Now this, monks, is the Noble Truth of dukkha: Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & 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 (this is a link to a sutra, a translation of a direct teaching of the Buddha)

Buddhism categorizes Three Kinds of Suffering:

  • The is suffering of suffering: the outright pain of, say, stubbing your toe. I love it that the Pali word for this is dukkha-dukkha. Suffering-suffering.
  • The suffering of change: that experience when you think things are just right and you want them to stay how they are right now (which is impossible since they are impermanent) and they change—which they inevitably will.
  • And the suffering of cyclic existence—which I like to think of as the pervasive suffering of conditioning. This is a dense topic, but think of it for now as this: All our life is spent trying to finally fix samsara. We are constantly hoping for something that can’t actually happen, which is for the world as we know it to be fixed once and for all. “If I just (fill in the blank) then I will be happy once and for all.” Thinking like this, we run off to exert our effort to change things in life for the better. But the effort will never end and we forget that part. Money can’t fix it all. Intellect can’t fix it all. A good heart can’t fix it all. This is samsara—when it’s broken, it’s working! That’s it’s nature.

Since these three sufferings are the natural experience of being human, we are happier when we acknowledge this truth and live our lives accordingly. When you get a new cup, remember that one day it will break.

This is deeper than it might seem. To expound on suffering is not to say there is not joy, or even bliss in life. There most certainly is…new found love, cherry blossoms in spring, puppies and beauty are all joyful experiences. It’s more to say that to the extent that we recognize the character of life’s experiences as suffering, and to know that that suffering is transitory and illusory, our craving, confusion and disturbing emotions will subside naturally. There is relief in living inside truth.

In addition to those three categories of suffering, there are The Eight Sufferings of Being Human

  1. The suffering of being born
  2. The suffering of old age
  3. The suffering of sickness and
  4. The suffering of death.
  5. The suffering of worry about future harsh circumstances
  6. The suffering of being separated from the beings and the things that you love
  7. The suffering of not accomplishing what you most wish to accomplish
  8. The suffering of meeting situations you wish you could avoid.

The first four are conditions that every single human being will suffer, to one degree of another. No exceptions will be made. In addition to those four, each human life will be marked by four more sufferings, to a greater or lesser degree, which are enumerated in 5-8 in the list.

The Buddha and his disciples, especially including Shariputra, one of his main disciples, expanded greatly on these basic ideas about suffering.

If this feels depressing, remember that the next three Noble Truths tell what causes suffering and let’s us know that we can be free from suffering and even give us a map to freedom from suffering. These Four Noble Truths are a treatise a physician might make: The disease identified, the cause explained, the fact that it is curable and the cure.

Good news, right? Keep reading. The next post is about the Second Noble Truth.