We left off with Gautama becoming fully enlightened, becoming a Buddha. One of the first things he did was get together his little group of ascetic mates and deliver his first sermon, detailing what he called the Four Noble Truths.
In short, the Four Noble Truths are:
- Suffering exists.
- Suffering is caused by attachment to desires.
- Suffering ceases when that attachment ceases.
- Suffering can be stopped by practising the Eightfold Path.
Which seems a bit like cheating, because the fourth Noble Truth contains an eightfold path, etc. But apparently at around the time of Gautama, physicians used a similar formula when approaching diseases – 1) identify the disease; 2) identify its cause; 3) identify whether or not there’s a cure; 4) identify the cure.
1: Suffering exists
Also quoted as “life is suffering”. It’s interesting that in Gautama’s time, this Noble Truth was so obvious as to barely be worth saying. Life for almost everyone in the time of the Buddha was short and brutal, compared to life for those in privileged sectors of advanced industrialisation (such as anyone reading this blog). It’s easy to forget that for the majority of life on earth, “life is suffering” is more transparently and obviously true.
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You'll never guess what the Sanskrit word for "impermanence" is...
That’s not to say that the observation doesn’t hold true for we privileged few. Despite our wealth, we are still faced with the inevitabilities of sickness, old age and death – not just for us, but also for our loved ones. Certainly the severity of some of our sufferings are ameliorated by modern science and technology, and we have vastly more means of distracting ourselves from future inevitabilities, but in the end we cannot avoid suffering.
Even when we’re experiencing any of a range of pleasures in life – good food, interesting dreams, sex, falling in love, the birth of our child, spiritual highs, chemical highs… Even then, none of them last forever, and we’re often aware either consciously or unconsciously that these too shall end.
It’s worth noting too that Buddhism came out of an Indian context where it was taken for granted that death meant reincarnation, and that good karma resulted in a more pleasant rebirth and bad karma resulted in a less pleasant rebirth. So death provided no release from the inevitability of suffering, in Gautama’s view. Neither did accumulating enough good karma to be reborn in a heaven realm, as that karma would eventually be burned off and birth in more painful realms would result.
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This is not the Circle of Life you're looking for. Move along.
Though those three sights which spurred Gautama’s quest originally – disease, old age, death – were inevitable natural sources of suffering, there’s also the vast array of evil that human beings visit upon each other. Not only is there the obvious suffering caused by violence, but also the less direct consequences of economic systems that deprive people of clean drinking water, food and other necessities. The Buddha’s concerns about suffering included man-made suffering too.
2: Suffering is caused by attachment to desires
In investigating the cause of suffering, Gautama ended up detailing a vicious cycle of cause and effect that makes suffering inevitable for most people. Traditionally there are 12 interrelated steps along this path towards the arising of suffering (“dukkha”). Summing it up briefly makes it sound like a quote from the appalling Star Wars prequels, but here goes:
Ignorance leads to mistaken impressions. Mistaken impressions lead to preferences. Preferences lead to clinging and craving. Clinging and craving lead to suffering.
That’s a pretty simplified version. What each of those vague terms really mean, and how they cause each other, is a much larger story, but I’ll see if I can explain briefly.
I’ve tried to explain the doctrine of not-self (anatta) elsewhere. Not-self means there is no “I” or “we”, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use those terms. We labour under the mistaken impression that we exist as something individual that persists from one moment to the next. When we are under this mistaken impression, we identify with transient impermanent things, like our bodies, our feelings, our beliefs, our memories, our social status, etc. When we identify with these finite, unsatisfactory things, we set ourselves up for suffering when they don’t last or we don’t get what we want.
Additionally, because we identify with these little things, we try to grab more little things to prop them up and make them last longer, getting greedy. We get frustrated and angry when we can’t get more of those things we’ve decided we want. We get afraid when those things with which we identify are threatened. This greed for things, anger at not getting them, and fear of losing them are the causes of most inter-personal suffering: people hurting other people.
Image may be NSFW.
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Identification with the body and fear of it being threatened seems fairly obvious. But consider identification with a nation (patriotism/nationalism) or identification with a skin colour (white pride) or with a religion or with a sports team or a political party or a political philosophy (anarchism included). When that thing with which we identify is insulted, or questioned, or threatened, we take it personally and react defensively. The White Pride guy identifying with his skin colour actually suffers when he is in the presence of someone he doesn’t consider white. The Muslim feels personally attacked when the existence of God is questioned. And the anarchist gets hot under the collar when someone puts him on the spot and asks just how his beliefs could ever be put into action.
So all of these identifications cause suffering, because they’re based on (and they feed into) the idea that we are separate individuals persisting from moment to moment.
3: Suffering ceases when the attachment ceases
The third Noble Truth is just that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there is a way out, that liberation is possible. Liberation from suffering is possible because Gautama discovered an effective means of chipping away at a particularly vulnerable link in that causal chain I mentioned above. In other words, liberation is possible because ignorance can be replaced with insight.
Now, a quick word on that. Recognising intellectually and rationally the truth of not-self is not the same as being enlightened and liberated. The kind of change that has to occur is at a more intuitive level. Understanding the reasoning behind not-self isn’t a bad thing, but until a concrete experiential change has occurred in the way someone sees the world, all they are is a deluded person saying, “I don’t actually exist!”
An intellectual appreciation of a philosophical position will not stop life from being suffering; nor will it dissolve greed, fear and anger; nor will it dissolve those patterns of behaviour that cause suffering in those around us. To quote the Bible, “by their fruits you will know them”.
Or, to quote the Dhammapada…
A careless person, quoting much of the scriptural text, but not living it
Cannot share the abundance of the holy life,
Just as the cowherd, counting other people’s cattle,
Cannot taste the milk or ghee.Reciting a small portion of the scripture,
But putting it diligently into practice,
Letting go of passion, aggression and confusion,
Revering the truth with a clear mind
And not clinging to anything, here or hereafter,
Brings the harvest of the holy life.
Which brings us to the question: just what is Buddhist practice that is supposed to be able to make such a fundamental change to the way one views the world that it brings into question whether there’s one viewing the world at all in the first place?
Well, that would be the fourth Noble Truth, also known as the Eightfold Path, and I’m afraid that will be getting a Buddhism 101 post all of its own.
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