Four Noble Truths: Understanding Suffering

So,

In these next weeks we'll be looking at these first teachings after the Buddha's realization.

And just to say that the actually the very first teaching was to a group of ascetics,

A group of practitioners,

Meditation practitioners,

Those seeking the way of the Buddha but not his way.

They were really not eating very much and really restraint,

Restraining themselves from food and from sleep and from any sort of sensual pleasure.

And so the Buddha taught them when he came to see them again.

He said,

You know,

The way is not renunciation,

Complete and total renunciation of food and sleep and any form of life sustaining effort but rather it's the middle way and it's not going to the other extreme of just gluttony and sensual pleasure.

The middle path.

So as we look at these teachings and we're looking at the Four Noble Truths,

I think it's helpful to remember this middle way.

Sometimes,

You know,

People perceive Buddhism as like,

Oh,

That's the path of suffering.

It's a pretty polarizing statement.

But the middle way,

There is suffering and there is an end to suffering.

The Buddha was sometimes called the great physician in realizing these kind of four endeavors or tasks.

He diagnosed the human condition,

You know,

There is suffering.

There is pain in this life.

There's an oppressive nature that can be experienced.

Our experiences,

You can feel the heaviness of them when we get lost in our thinking and the cause,

The cause is reactivity and grasping,

Kind of a contention with this moment's experience.

The prognosis is there's a possible end from this affliction of reactivity and the prescription is there's a path,

A way out of this endless cycle of reactivity and contention.

So our task,

What we're being asked is to understand that there is suffering.

The truth of it,

The Buddha said to understand it fully and this is a different relationship from what many people have with suffering.

The idea to actually stop and get to know it better,

To study it and investigate it,

To understand it,

It feels very counterintuitive for many people because we want to get rid of it when we're not enjoying something,

When there's contention,

When there's contraction,

We want to turn it off.

We want to escape it,

We want to attack it,

We want to do something about it,

Right?

And just to say that the purpose of this path is not to suffer,

So again we're not moving to an extreme,

Remember the middle path.

It's okay to wish for the end of suffering and to not suffer but one wise way of doing this is to turn towards it.

Maybe turning towards it within like some space of ease or balance.

Then we can be with suffering.

The wording of the first noble truth in its simplest form in the translation is this is suffering.

But the way that if you look at the suttas the full sentence is one understands or one knows this is suffering.

So here the word is more to know.

One knows this is suffering than to understand because sometimes understanding can suggest that we understand the whole ecology of suffering,

Where it comes from,

All the elements of it,

All the consequences.

So knowing implies some very particular recognition,

Some very particular understanding.

So if we just recognize,

Oh this is suffering,

That's kind of a clue to the Buddhist approach to this thing we call suffering.

We learn how to be present and to see it in an equanimous way or at least to see it.

When we see it we can at least approach it in a way that we're not adding more to it.

You know it's like,

Oh this is suffering.

Not reacting,

Not attacking,

Not being angry or collapsing in despair.

To just be able to sit upright,

Metaphorically at least,

Without being pulled away.

To sort of see suffering right in the eye.

Like when the Buddha before he woke up he said,

I see you Mara,

I see you suffering,

This is suffering.

And that can be a difficult task but it's the task of practice.

And what we're doing when we sit and collectively breathe is we build our capacity to be grounded and centered in ourselves.

To be relaxed in a certain way and to look honestly at what's going on within us.

And some people find it really comforting,

Like a relief to hear that the task,

This Buddhist task is not to avoid suffering.

Some people grew up in families who were avoiding suffering or pretending it wasn't there or denying it in some ways,

Part of their story.

But to actually experience it without reactivity,

That's a very different way of being with it.

Like oh this is suffering,

Let's talk about it,

Let me be with it and look at it and not to suffer better but to understand it.

We can experience difficulty without all the extra waves of reactivity.

So the task is to understand suffering,

This is the first of the four truths.

And the Pali word for suffering is Dukkha.

And Dukkha is translated into English in a variety of ways.

It's nice to have a couple different translations because each translation,

It kind of points to a different angle or perspective.

So we can take Dukkha and the English translation suffering as kind of like a broad umbrella.

Like that's an umbrella term that encompasses many different parts of the human experience.

Some of our sufferings are very mild and some of them are really big.

But there's this whole array.

And so this variation on translations can give us some different perspectives.

So over these next weeks I'm going to offer different perspectives on it.

And today I'd like to just touch on some of the common English translations for this word,

Dukkha.

I think first of all it's important to understand that the word Dukkha is an adjective,

It's not a noun.

As an adjective the literal meaning of Dukkha is painful.

This pain is almost like a metaphor for all the forms of suffering human beings can have.

Whatever Dukkha is in our psychological,

Emotional,

Experiential and physical world it's like ouch,

That is a word that we can all kind of experience together.

It's something that we can track around.

Ouch.

Something that hurts.

So for example there's a common teaching that things like birth and old age,

Sickness and death are Dukkha.

And if we translate Dukkha as painful we can say birth is painful,

Old age is painful,

Sickness is painful,

Death is painful.

And now we're talking about something that people can really identify with.

But that birth is other things besides just being painful but it's also painful.

Old age is other things besides painful but it's also painful.

Sickness is also painful.

Death and dying can be quite painful.

I find that translation is useful.

This is painful and it's other things besides painful.

Really taking that overall perception of this Buddhist path as life is suffering it's like no there is suffering,

There is pain and it's other things too.

Sometimes a translation of Dukkha into English is stress.

So birth is stressful,

Old age is stressful,

Sickness is stressful,

Death is stressful.

And this is the raw experiential association for the word Dukkha.

The translation has the advantage of being more physical without any evaluation of whether it's right or wrong or good or bad.

It's just stressful.

The idea is that stress can follow us around in all kinds of ways.

Stress can even occur with things that we're looking forward to or love doing.

So to understand the wide extent to which stress is part of our lives goes beyond what many people think of as suffering.

Another translation of Dukkha is unsatisfactory.

And this is a pretty popular translation but it has in mind a more intellectual or philosophical association.

It's evaluative.

It evaluates.

It has to do with making an evaluation,

Constructing an intellectual understanding that's a little removed from direct experience.

Whereas pain is about direct experience,

Stress feels like direct experience.

Isn't that unsatisfactory?

How that translate is evaluative or intellectual in that you have to explain in which ways it's unsatisfactory.

With the translation of pain,

You don't have to explain in what way it's pain.

You know it's painful and stress is the same way.

But unsatisfactory,

It's clearly more complicated because it requires some explanation or understanding beyond just feeling or sensing something as unsatisfactory.

So Dukkha,

This uneasiness,

This vulnerability,

The stress,

The pain,

It's universal.

It's all of us.

Some teachers say mainly it's just our human nervous system registering existence and feeling shaky.

I kind of agree with that.

There's this background anxiety in the human nervous system that there's something around the corner that's threatening.

But if we can remember this first fundamental truth,

There is stress,

There is pain and it's not so personal.

It's not so personal.

Then there's not as much suffering around it.

So the first noble truth,

There is pain and it's to be investigated.

And what we do each week,

What we do together in practice and also in our own practice as we cultivate and develop our own personal practice is we investigate the ways we suffer.

Some people complain that by talking about suffering and putting that up as the first noble truth that Buddhism is kind of pessimistic,

A party pooper religion.

But the purpose of focusing on suffering is to understand so that we can be free from it,

Free from the causes of it.

We have to understand the illness in order to understand what the cure is going to be,

Right?

I spent years of my practice just naming suffering as it was arising in my experience.

Not so that I could suffer better but because it was useful to see.

Understanding the illness.

This is suffering.

The Dharma is not about finding something like some experience or some idea that brings about happiness.

I think really the Dharma is more about discovering some absence of a thing.

So to discover freedom and peace and happiness,

It comes from the absence of clinging,

You know,

The absence of it.

This is suffering.

Where am I clinging?

Where is their thirst?

Where is their compulsion?

Where is their holding?

Where is their attachment?

Where is their resistance?

So the absence of resistance and clinging and holding on when we can see them clearly and open to them,

That's reliable and there's freedom in that.

So the purpose of really getting to know suffering,

To see it clearly and understand it,

Is part of the project,

The path of coming to the absence of it,

To let go of clinging in a very deep way.

So thank you.

We'll be discussing this over the next weeks ahead.

I appreciate your kind attention on these reflections on the Four Noble Truths.