The Buddha said he was interested in teaching only one thing: suffering,
and the end of suffering.
This isn’t as grim and hopeless as it sounds. In fact, as we’ll talk about
later, looking at our suffering with loving-kindness and skill can open the
door to an ocean of wisdom, peace and sanity.
So how did the Buddha come to his conclusion?
Siddhartha Gautama, as he was first
known, was said to be the son of a king who ruled over a large clan in eastern
India between the sixth and fourth
centuries BC -- about 2600 years ago.
When Prince Siddhartha was a few days old, a holy man prophesied that he
would either become a great military conqueror or a great spiritual teacher.
The king preferred the first outcome and raised the boy in luxury, shielding
him from knowledge of religion and human suffering.
As a result, Siddhartha reached the age of 29 with little experience of
the world beyond the walls of his palaces. He wanted for nothing. And yet, as
these stories go, he was restless. He was curious to see what the king had been
hiding from him.
So he asked his charioteer to take him for a ride around the countryside.
Along the way he encountered for the first time in his life an elderly man, a sick man, and a corpse.
It dawned on him that this was everyone’s inevitable fate, including his
own. In other words, he came face to face with his own mortality. Also along
the way he encountered a wandering ascetic, whom the driver explained was
someone who renounced the world and sought release from fear of death and
suffering.
Siddhartha returned to the palace and tried to resume his old life, but
it felt flat, cold, pointless. So he decided to shave his head, put on a
beggar’s robe, and leave the palace to try to solve the mystery of human
suffering.
This journey eventually led Siddhartha to become The Buddha, the
awakened one, and to discover what are called the Four Noble Truths, the foundation of the Buddha’s teachings.
- There is suffering
- There is a cause or source of
our suffering
- There is a way to end that
suffering
- The way to end suffering is the
Eightfold Path --
guidelines for cultivating a healthy, integrated, compassionate and
awakened life.
The word for suffering in Pali--a variation of Sanskrit--is dukkha,
which is rich with layers of meaning.
First, dukkah refers to the suffering of the physical body:
aging, sickness, death, aches and pains. Part of the human incarnation.
On another level, dukkah refers to the anxiety and stress that
arise from trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing, things that
are impermanent--in other words, everything.
Third, dukkah refers to the uneasiness that springs from our resistance to
the fact that no one thing exists apart from other things. Everyone and
everything is a unique but temporary manifestation of factors arising at a
particular moment in time, like waves on an ocean. The concept, called “dependent origination,” is complex,
but Thich Nhat Hanh uses a cup of tea to illustrate the idea.
We call the brown liquid in our cup tea, as if it were a fixed thing.
But if you look deeply, you can see that “tea” is made up of water, which over
time was ocean, snow, tears. The tea leaves are made up of sun, nutrient-rich
soil, and rain. And the tea wouldn’t exist apart from the labor of the men and
women who planted, harvested, packaged and shipped it to our stores, and their
ancestors who made the workers possible, and so on. If you remove just one of
those elements--no tea!
The same is true of us. We are made up of elements from across the
planet and universe, elements of our ancestors, taking this particular form in
this particular time in history. Take just one of those things away--water,
carbon, your great-great-grandmother--then no us.
Our manifestation depends on many other elements and factors. We inter-are. Or as Thay says, “I am because you are.”
In this third form of dukkah we cling to the idea that we are
separate from everyone and everything else. And that separate self must be
protected and provided for at all costs. We know where this leads, don’t we, in
our personal relationships, the relationships between classes and nations?
British philosopher Thomas Hobbes gloomily described human life in 1651
as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." And often to cover up this
feeling of hopelessness we might self-medicate, distract ourselves, or go into
deep denial that we will get old, sick, and die. We work out obsessively or get
plastic surgery to reclaim the fountain of youth.
But in the end, we find out, that’s as useful
as touching up a wilted rose with red house paint. As Helen Keller says,
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the
long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or
nothing.”
The problem isn’t our mortality or fragility,
as challenging as that is for many to accept. It’s the stories we create to
make sense of life, stories that often divide people and the world into safe
and dangerous, good and bad, worthy and unworthy.
Sometimes these stories inspire great acts of selflessness and
creativity. They lead to a Mother Teresa, a Nelson Mandela and a Martin Luther
King. Other times they’re dark and twisted and foreboding and lead us to behave
in unhealthy and destructive ways. They lead to an Adolf Hitler, a Josef
Stalin, a Ku Klux Klan.
But with kind attention, we can transform our suffering into rich, loamy
soil for cultivating the beautiful flowers of our practice, of loving-kindness,
of mindfulness, and of compassion. Thich Nhat Hanh says that we contain seeds
of loving compassion, and
seeds of anger and hatred. We water the seeds of compassion by breathing
mindfully. By meditating. By supporting one another in the sangha. By learning
to be more at ease with life exactly as it is, rather than wanting it to be
different. By creating space in our minds and hearts to take in all of life,
with its 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel: “Suffering confers neither privileges nor
rights. It all depends on how one uses it. If you use it to increase the
anguish of others or yourself, you are degrading, even betraying it. And yet
the day will come when we shall understand that suffering can elevate human
beings. God help us to bear our suffering well.”
We develop this capacity for spaciousness inside ourselves by learning
to be still. With a sincere and kind-hearted curiosity we watch the energies at
play behind our suffering and our stories. “Dear sorrow, I know you,” we might
say. “Dear anger, I see you and I am here for you.”
Rather than close down, pull back or lash out--in other words fight,
flight, or freeze, as evolutionary biology might urge us--we take the more
courageous path, the path of vulnerability. We let our awareness that everyone
grows old, grows sick, and dies to soften us, open us up, deepen and sweeten
and leaven our experience. To unite us. We realize that this isn’t my
suffering; it’s just suffering, part of the human experience.
This is wisdom. And as a result of this mindful attention, we become
lighter, fresher, friendlier, kinder -- with ourselves, and with the world.
With deep looking, we begin to see that birth and death, loss and gain,
joy and pain, praise and blame, are simply part of the river of human
experience, ever-changing, ever unfolding.
Thich Nhat Hanh: “The Buddha called suffering a Holy
Truth, because our suffering has the capacity of showing us the path to
liberation. Embrace your suffering, and let it reveal to you the way to peace.”
We must learn how to be compassionate with ourselves before we can be
compassionate toward the world, before we can become bodhisattvas. This doesn’t always come easily, does it? We can
be our own harshest critics--ruthless, even, in our self-assessment: I’m
stupid, I’m incompetent, I’m worthless. I’m unloved. Does any of that sound
familiar?
The Tao Te Ching says this:
I have just three
things to teach:
Simplicity, patience,
compassion.
These three are your
greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
You return to the
source of being.
Patient with both
friends and enemies,
You accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward
yourself,
You reconcile all beings in the world.
~Lao
Tzu
Jack Kornfield (from “A Lamp in the Darkness: Illuminating the Path
Through Difficult Times”) writes: “The one who knows (meaning the wisdom inside
of you, the Buddha that you are) sees the bigger picture behind every illness,
loss, and death. It knows that although you may feel that your life is ending,
new life is also growing in and around you. The universe continues to expand,
the Earth continues to turn through the seasons, the soil continues to bring
forth new growth. Even in the moment of your eventual death, all over the Earth
mothers will be giving birth, bringing new hope and love and difficulty and
possibility into the world.”
Learning to sit honestly with the inherent messiness and unspooling of
human life--because it’s like this for ALL life--is necessary before we can begin to awaken. And as Thich
Nhat Hanh said, “Once the door of awareness has been opened, you cannot
close it.”
I have certainly found this to be true in my life. Those moments when I
have been able to regard my suffering with kind attention and love has been
like tapping into a deep and self-replenishing well of calm and refreshing
energy.
Thich Nhat Hanh: “Happiness is only possible when we
stop running and appreciate the present moment and who we are. Who we are is a
wonder. We do not need to be anyone else. We are a wonder of life.”
Hafiz: “Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly
-- let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even
divine ingredients can.”
My hope is that this sangha also seasons us and
supports our practice of self-compassion. Even if there are days you cannot
attend, simply bringing the sangha to mind can be like the bell we invite to
bring us back to your true selves.
