“Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don’t, it isn’t holy at all. We just drown in the ocean of our suffering.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of The Buddha’s Teaching
In northern India, over twenty-six-hundred years ago, a young nobleman, Siddhartha Gautama, determined to understand the nature, cause and remedy to the unique suffering he saw as the plight of human beings, took up the life of an ascetic, one who devotes their life entirely to meditation, ritual, yoga and complete denial of material and bodily comfort.
He hoped, as many ascetics have, and has been quite common in Indian culture even to this day, that if he could completely conquer human desire for comfort and social standing, he would overcome suffering and find enlightenment.
After fully exploring and mastering the ascetic’s art, Siddhartha realized that the extremity of this path could not bring him the understanding he sought. He realized that asceticism was its own form of egoic lifestyle, one that was in rejection of what was balanced and natural, and therefore could not lead to the perfect understanding and equanimity that he sought. It is told that he then sat in meditation beneath a bodhi tree and vowed not to rise until he realized enlightenment.
He sat all day and all night, and as the morning star arose, it is said that he experienced full enlightenment and saw with clarity the answers he sought. Then after meditating for another forty-nine days he walked to the Deer Park nearby and gave his first teaching.
There, to a small group of his fellow ascetics, he related his vision of Life as infinitely connected and therefore “empty” of separateness, of the necessity of a manner of life he called “the Middle Way,” neither ascetic nor indulgent, but rather balanced in the manner that Nature always expresses balance, and that within each human exists the ability to realize full enlightenment, just as he had.
He then presented what is known as “The Four Noble Truths,” a teaching on the nature of human suffering. He said that in all of Nature there is a kind of suffering unique to humans that is of a subjective quality, a product of the mind. He said that there exists a possibility of release from this suffering, and that he understood the path that frees us from this suffering.
This is said to have set the “Dharma Wheel” of Buddhism in motion – the path of understanding that eventually will lead to the liberation of all sentient life from affliction caused by humanity’s delusional perception of a Universe of separateness, in hierarchy, with humanity as the foremost species, and self-concern as the highest motivation.
From the root word, “buddh” that translates in the Pali language of ancient India as “to awaken,” Siddhartha became known from that day as “The Buddha,” the one who “awakened,” and the path that he taught, “Buddhism,” the path of “awakening.”
The Four Noble Truths
The First Noble Truth – Suffering exists. There is pain and sickness and death for humans as for all creatures, and impermanence is a fact of existence. To be human, however, is to experience a unique kind of suffering in all the Universe, a subjective suffering of the mind (dukkha), also translated as “bitter or unsatisfactory experience.” No other creature suffers in this way.
The Second Noble Truth is that this suffering has an identifiable origin and it is the belief in a separate self (ego), and our clinging to this false identity that can never feel secure because it experiences itself and all creation in separateness and impermanence which is intolerable to the ego. Because our minds have the unique ability to imagine, we want Life to be the way we imagine would make it better for us, and we want these better conditions to be permanent.
Our understanding of this “better,” however, is deeply flawed and ultimately unattainable, and this creates emotional suffering. In our struggle to make a perfect life as we imagine it and our unhappiness with the way it is, we create much suffering in the world and in ourselves.
We want what we want and are afraid of what we think threatens our ambitions. We cannot see beyond our preoccupation with this “self” in past and future time, and are filled with insecurity. We are blind to the interconnectedness, intelligence, and vast beauty that transcends impermanence and is the principle quality of Life.
As characterized by Eckhart Tolle, we are in “resistance to what is.” We are lost in the delusion of our separateness and the feeling of insignificance that comes with it. Our lives become dominated by craving and grasping after what we think will make our lives more satisfactory and less scary and by attachment to what we think will give us security. But this only makes our lives ultimately more unsatisfactory, insecure and scary since it is unachievable.
Everything we cling to, everything we attach to, is either unattainable in an absolute way, or impermanent. That which gives comfort will become a source of discomfort, of suffering, when it goes away, as everything in the world of form must. Our lives are spent chasing after security in possessions, ideas, affiliations, and relationships that cannot give the security and happiness we seek.
The Third Noble Truth is a declaration of healing. It says that there is a path, a way that takes us to liberation from the false ideas of security in control, manipulation and possessions. This Truth also tells us that any interpretation of the Buddha’s Doctrine as “Life is suffering” is in error. The teaching is that Life contains suffering and joy, and that with the mastering of the conditions that lead to suffering, we discover boundless reasons for joy and happiness as our true Nature. We must touch and feel and be honest about the fact that we resist Life-as-it-is.
We must see how some suffering is a natural fact of Life, a consequence of karma and impermanence, and we must realize how unnecessary is the subjective suffering we create for ourselves and others that can then turn into more suffering, both in real and imagined circumstances. We must realize that if we look deeply into and truly understand our experiences of suffering, the deep looking will transform the suffering and open us into an expanded experience of Life, and ultimately, into enlightenment.
The Fourth Noble Truth is the path, the practices, insights and states of consciousness that lead to the liberation from suffering and to a life that is peaceful, joyful, wonder-full. In its simplest form, it tells us to examine our attachments, and ultimately, to release our clinging to this idea of a separate self with all its attachments and grasping, its attempts at controlling Life. It instructs us into a life of fearless inquiry through meditation and mindfulness that is capable of experiencing the true infinite connectedness of everything, of realizing that we and all phenomenon are “empty” of a separate existence, and therefore the foundational existential insecurity that leads to our suffering is delusional.
It then offers suggestions about the manner in which Life can be lived so as to bring about this realization — known as “The Eightfold Path,” They are: Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. It teaches that by living these “right” paths, we will discover the illusion of clinging to this insecure self-centered identity and discover the limitless beauty and boundless interconnectedness of Life, and the compassion that naturally arises from this Right View.
It is very important to understand that the “right” connotation used here is very different than what we are accustomed to in the West as commandments from religious authority. Harkening back to the word, “Dharma” that means the Way or Path that is a natural expression of the harmony of the Universe, what is “right” in this context then is that which leads to harmony, balance and release from suffering, and our faculty for realizing this harmony is not the intellect but rather intuition. We “know” when something is right or wrong because of how it feels, not whether it aligns with some rule.
This ability to “know” requires what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “looking deeply into,” more deeply than we are accustomed to. Without it, we are self-centered and can only see the way we are conditioned by society to see, applying only our faculty for thought — the voice of conditioned ego. It has no universality or wisdom. It is always self-referencing and self-centered, and will accumulate and cause suffering. We will have a tendency to make a story out of our suffering, live inside that story, and, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, then be vulnerable to “drown in the ocean of our suffering,” and we will pull others under with us.
If something is right, it will naturally be an expression of the harmony that is the Universe, and since we are an expression, a creation within the Universe, this knowledge is within us. How could it not be? Just as The Buddha went within the quiet of his own awareness to discover the truth of suffering, he taught with his Eightfold Path that we have within us the truth of what is right. The Buddha’s teaching is a finger pointing the way, and we must discover our own intuitive authority that will reveal a Self deeper than our personal self, a concept that is central to Buddhist teaching.
We must get beyond believing in ideas of right and wrong that originate in the artificiality of the human ego, what Buddhism calls egoic delusion, taught to us by the macro-ego of culture and society. Most fundamentally, we must realize that violence, as defined as the imposition of egoic will over the right of all Life to be honored in peace and respect, is not-right. Non-violence, insight, mindfulness, compassion, connectedness and respect are the basis for what is being defined in this context as “right.”
With this “looking deeply” we begin to truly see the Universe-as-it-is and we begin to intuit the beautiful necessity of everything, including that which we had previously rejected and was a source of suffering – even our suffering. As Thich Nhat Hanh has said: “Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it.”
In the second part of this essay, to be published next month, we will explore the particulars of The Eightfold Path.