Reference: Buddhism
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
Our evolution depends on resolving the anomalies of the universe and not the fictitious “anomalies of self.”
When the Buddha finally managed to break through the spell of rapture that rooted him to the Immovable Spot for the forty-nine days of his enlightenment, he arose and began a walk of over one hundred miles toward India’s holy city of Banaras. Six miles short of that city, in a deer park at Sarnath, he stopped to preach his first sermon. The congregation was small—only five ascetics who had shared his severe austerities but had broken with him in anger when he renounced that approach, only to have now become his first disciples. His subject was the Four Noble Truths. His first formal discourse after his awakening, it was a declaration of the key discoveries that had come to him as the climax of his six-year quest.
The first sermon of Buddha was on Four Noble Truths. It was a summarization of his key realizations of his six-year quest.
Asked to list in propositional form their four most considered convictions about life, most people would probably stammer. The Four Noble Truths constitute Buddha’s answer to that request. Together they stand as the axioms of his system, the postulates from which the rest of his teachings logically derive.
The For Noble Truths stand as the axioms of Buddha’s system.
The First Noble Truth is that life is dukkha, usually translated “suffering.” Though far from its total meaning, suffering is an important part of that meaning and should be brought to focus before proceeding to other connotations.
The First Noble Truth is that life is dukkha, usually translated “suffering.”
Contrary to the view of early Western interpreters, the Buddha’s philosophy was not pessimistic. A report of the human scene can be as grim as one pleases; the question of pessimism does not arise until we are told whether it can be improved. Because the Buddha was certain that it could be, his outlook falls within Heinrich Zimmer’s observation that “everything in Indian thought supports the basic insight that, fundamentally, all is well. A supreme optimism prevails everywhere.” But the Buddha saw clearly that life as typically lived is unfulfilling and filled with insecurity.
Buddha saw clearly that life as typically lived is unfulfilling and filled with insecurity.
He did not doubt that it is possible to have a good time and that having a good time is enjoyable, but two questions obtruded. First, how much of life is thus enjoyable. And second, at what level of our being does such enjoyment proceed. Buddha thought the level was superficial, sufficient perhaps for animals but leaving deep regions of the human psyche empty and wanting. By this understanding even pleasure is gilded pain. “Earth’s sweetest joy is but disguised pain,” William Drummond wrote, while Shelley speaks of “that unrest which men miscall delight.” Beneath the neon dazzle is darkness; at the core—not of reality but of unregenerated human life—is the “quiet desperation” Thoreau saw in most peoples’ lives. That is why we seek distractions, for distractions divert us from what lies beneath the surface. Some may be able to distract themselves for long periods, but the darkness is unrelieved.
Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life:
A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife.
By Buddha’s understanding even pleasure was gilded pain.
That such an estimate of life’s usual condition is prompted more by realism than by morbidity is suggested by the extent to which thinkers of every stripe have shared it. Existentialists describe life as a “useless passion,” “absurd,” “too much (de trop).” Bertrand Russell, a scientific humanist, found it difficult to see why people should take unhappily to news that the universe is running down, inasmuch as “I do not see how an unpleasant process can be made less so [by being] indefinitely repeated.” Poetry, always a sensitive barometer, speaks of “the pitiful confusion of life” and “time’s slow contraction on the most hopeful heart.” The Buddha never went further than Robert Penn Warren:
Oh, it is real. It is the only real thing.
Pain. So let us name the truth, like men.
We are born to joy that joy may become pain.
We are born to hope that hope may become pain.
We are born to love that love may become pain.
We are born to pain that pain may become more
Pain, and from that inexhaustible superflux
We may give others pain as our prime definition.
Such an estimate of life’s usual condition is prompted more by realism than by morbidity.
Even Albert Schweitzer, who considered India pessimistic, echoed the Buddha’s appraisal almost to idiom when he wrote, “Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of men, but of the whole creation.”
In my opinion, the whole purpose of life is to evolve, and that is not easy. But with that purpose all pain becomes tolerable.
Dukkha, then, names the pain that to some degree colors all finite existence. The word’s constructive implications come to light when we discover that it was used in Pali to refer to wheels whose axles were off-center, or bones that had slipped from their sockets. (A modern metaphor might be a shopping cart we try to steer from the wrong end.) The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.
The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.
Having an analytical mind, the Buddha was not content to leave this First Truth in this generalized form. He went on to pinpoint six moments when life’s dislocation becomes glaringly apparent. Rich or poor, average or gifted, all human beings experience:
1. The trauma of birth. Psychoanalysts have in our time made a great deal of this point. Though Freud came to deny that the birth trauma was the source of all later anxiety, to the end he considered it anxiety’s prototype. The birth experience “involves just such a concatenation of painful feelings, of discharges and excitation, and of bodily sensations, as have become a prototype for all occasions on which life is endangered, ever after to be reproduced again in us as the dread of ‘anxiety’ conditions.”
2. The pathology of sickness.
3. The morbidity of decrepitude. In the early years sheer physical vitality joins with life’s novelty to render life almost automatically good. In later years the fears arrive: fear of financial dependence; fear of being unloved and unwanted; fear of protracted illness and pain; fear of being physically repulsive and dependent on others; fear of seeing one’s life as a failure in some important respect.
4. The phobia of death. On the basis of years of clinical practice, Carl Jung reported that he found death to be the deepest terror in every patient he had analyzed who had passed the age of forty. Existentialists join him in calling attention to the extent to which the fear of death mars healthy living.
5. To be tied to what one dislikes. Sometimes it is possible to break away, but not always. An incurable disease, a stubborn character defect—for better or for worse there are martyrdoms to which people are chained for life.
6. To be separated from what one loves.
All human beings experience the trauma of birth, the pathology of sickness, the morbidity of decrepitude, the phobia of death, to be tied to what one dislikes, and to be separated from what one loves.
No one denies that the shoe of life pinches in these six places. The First Noble Truth pulls them together by concluding that the five skandas (life components) are painful. As these skandas are body, sensations, thoughts, feelings, and consciousness—in short, the sum of what we generally consider life to be—the statement amounts to the assertion that the whole of human life (again, as usually lived) is suffering. Somehow life has become estranged from reality, and this estrangement precludes real happiness until it is overcome.
The five components of life—body, sensations, thoughts, feelings, and consciousness—are painful.
For the rift to be healed we need to know its cause, and the Second Noble Truth identifies it. The cause of life’s dislocation is tanha. Again imprecisions of translations—all are to some degree dishonest—make it wise to stay close to the original word. Tanha is usually translated as “desire.” There is some truth in this—the kind we encounter in Heartbreak House when George Bernard Shaw has Ellie exclaim, “I feel now as if there was nothing I could not do, because I want nothing,” which assertion moves Captain Shotover to his one enthusiasm in the play: “That’s the only real strength. That’s genius. That’s better than rum.” But if we try to make desire tanha’s equivalent, we run into difficulties. To begin with, the equivalence would make this Second Truth unhelpful, for to shut down desires, all desires, in our present state would be to die, and to die is not to solve life’s problem. But beyond being unhelpful, the claim of equivalence would be flatly wrong, for there are some desires the Buddha explicitly advocated—the desire for liberation, for example, or for the happiness of others.
The Second Noble truth: The cause of life’s dislocation is tanha, usually translated as “thirst.”
Tanha is a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfillment. When we are selfless we are free, but that is precisely the difficulty—to maintain that state. Tanha is the force that ruptures it, pulling us back from the freedom of the all to seek fulfillment in our egos, which ooze like secret sores. Tanha consists of all “those inclinations which tend to continue or increase separateness, the separate existence of the subject of desire; in fact, all forms of selfishness, the essence of which is desire for self at the expense, if necessary, of all other forms of life. Life being one, all that tends to separate one aspect from another must cause suffering to the unit which even unconsciously works against the Law. Our duty to our fellows is to understand them as extensions, other aspects, of ourselves—fellow facets of the same Reality.”
Our duty to our fellows is to understand them as extensions, other aspects, of ourselves—fellow facets of the same Reality.
This is some distance from the way people normally understand their neighbors. The customary human outlook lies a good halfway toward Ibsen’s description of a lunatic asylum in which “each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with a bung of self and seasoned in a well of self.” Given a group photograph, whose face does one scan for first? It is a small but telling symptom of the devouring cancer that causes sorrow. Where is the man who is as concerned that no one go hungry as that his own children be fed? Where is the woman who is as concerned that the standard of living for the entire world rise, as that her own salary be raised? Here, said the Buddha, is where the trouble lies; this is why we suffer. Instead of linking our faith and love and destiny to the whole, we persist in strapping these to the puny burros of our separate selves, which are certain to stumble and give out eventually. Coddling our individual identities, we lock ourselves inside “our skin-encapsulated egos” (Alan Watts), and seek fulfillment through their intensification and expanse. Fools to suppose that imprisonment can bring release! Can we not see that “tis the self by which we suffer”? Far from being the door to abundant life, the ego is a strangulated hernia. The more it swells, the tighter it shuts off the free-flowing circulation on which health depends, and the more pain increases.
Instead of linking our faith and love and destiny to the whole, we persist in strapping these to the puny burros of our separate selves, which are certain to stumble and give out eventually.
The Third Noble Truth follows logically from the Second. If the cause of life’s dislocation is selfish craving, its cure lies in the overcoming of such craving. If we could be released from the narrow limits of self-interest into the vast expanse of universal life, we would be relieved of our torment. The Fourth Noble Truth prescribes how the cure can be accomplished. The overcoming of tanha, the way out of our captivity, is through the Eightfold Path.
The Third Noble truth: If the cause of life’s dislocation is selfish craving, its cure lies in the overcoming of such craving.
The Fourth Noble truth: The way out of our captivity, is through the Eightfold Path.
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