3
The Buddha Tells It Like It Is
To go into the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
—WENDELL BERRY
AFTER A LONG AND WINDING JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY with many ups and downs, the Buddha, an ordinary human being like you and me, sat down under a tree for a long time, and then he attained enlightenment—also known as liberation, freedom, or awakening. At first he wasn’t sure if he could find the words to share his discovery, but eventually he gave his first teaching in the form of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhism—what Buddhists call the Dharma, which simply means “teachings”—was born.
Many people will tell you they know the first noble truth, but their usual rendering, “Life is suffering,” is responsible for a lot of misunderstanding about what the Buddha taught. In offering us the first noble truth, the Buddha was not making a negative pronouncement. If so, it’s hard to imagine why he would have called it “noble.”
“Life is suffering” is misleading for at least two reasons. First, the Buddha used an ancient Indian language similar to Sanskrit called Pali, and the word he used in Pali for the first noble truth,
dukkha
, is difficult to translate
. Dukkha
is too multifaceted and nuanced a term to be captured in the one-word translation “suffering.” And second, the fact of dukkha in our lives doesn’t mean that life is
only
dukkha
.
To capture the essence of what the Buddha meant by the presence of dukkha in our lives, it’s helpful to keep other possible translations of this key word in mind: unsatisfactoriness (that is, dissatisfaction with the circumstances of our life), anguish, stress, discomfort, dis-ease, to name just a few. Dukkha is a term worth becoming familiar with, especially when exploring how to be sick. When I first encountered the various translations for dukkha, they resonated powerfully for me. Finally, someone was describing this life in a way that fit a good portion of my experience, both physical and mental: stress, discomfort, unsatisfactoriness. What a relief to know it wasn’t just
me
, or wasn’t just
my
life!
The feeling that the Buddha understood the pain of my life allowed me to start the day-to-day work of accepting that dukkha is present for all beings. Even in the darkest early days of the illness, when I didn’t understand what was happening to me (was I dying?), I always had the first noble truth propping me up, telling me, “You know this is the way it is. You were born and so are subject to change, disease, and ultimately death. It happens differently for each person. This is one of the ways it’s happening to you.”
I’ll never forget listening to Spirit Rock teacher John Travis giving a talk on a ten-day retreat. He suddenly stopped talking and slowly scanned the room, making eye contact with every single one of us. Then he very gently said, “I know you. We all know each other. We’ve all had our hearts broken by the relentless search to avoid suffering.” I would only add that this relentless search just brings more suffering because dukkha is an aspect of existence for all living beings born into this world.
The first noble truth—the fact of dukkha—helps me accept being sick because that fact tells me my life is as it should be. “Our life is always all right,” says Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Even if we have horrendous problems, it’s just our life.”
Joko Beck points out that the second part of the word
suffer (-fer)
is from the Latin verb
ferre
which means “to bear” and that the first part
(suf-)
is from
sub
, meaning “under.” Taking this view, dukkha is not about life bearing down on us from the
outside
, but instead dukkha is an internal phenomenon of bearing life up from underneath. Joko Beck writes:
So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we’re being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we’re receiving something that’s making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just
being
it.
Just “being” life as it is for me has meant ending my professional career years before I expected to, being house-bound and even bed-bound much of the time, feeling continually sick in the body, and not being able to socialize very often. Using Joko Beck’s teaching, I was able to use these facts that make up my life as a starting point. I began to bow down to these facts, to accept them, to
be
them. And then from there, I looked around to see what life had to offer.
And I found a lot.
The End of Suffering
As I said above, the Buddha didn’t say that life is
only
suffering, stressful, unsatisfactory. He simply taught that dukkha is present in the life of all beings. Years ago, a law student told me that Buddhism was a pessimistic religion. When I asked him why he thought that, he said, “Well, its first noble truth is: Life sucks.” In trying to explain to him why that was not a valid translation of the Buddha’s teaching, a shift occurred in how I thought of the first noble truth. Yes, it’s true that life brings with it a considerable share of suffering and stress, but happiness and joy are also available to us. The Buddha expressed this by describing life as the realm of the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows. Buddhist teachers focus on those ten thousand sorrows because our inability to see the truth of dukkha in our lives only increases it.
The Buddha said he taught two things: dukkha and the end of dukkha
.
Before we get into practices that have helped me on the path to the “end of dukkha,” we need to be very clear about the truth of dukkha itself, so we can understand what the “end of dukkha” might mean. It’s fruitless to begin the quest for the end of dukkha until we see that our life is just as it should be—dukkha and all. Do you know a single person, healthy or sick in body, who has not experienced suffering, unsatisfactoriness, anguish, stress, discomfort, dis-ease?
When I taught a class in Tort Law, we spent several weeks studying damages available to plaintiffs in a civil action. “Specials” are those damages for which plaintiff has a receipt: $1,000 for an MRI, for instance. “Generals” are referred to as plaintiff’s “pain and suffering.” No receipts here—the jury is simply asked to put a monetary value on this intangible damage. “Pain and suffering” is a stock phrase in the legal profession. Based on my Buddhist training, I decided to break down this category of damages into “bodily pain and mental suffering” simply because I thought it would help students understand the jury’s task better. The distinction applies here too, because when the Buddha talked about the “end of dukkha
,
” he wasn’t referring to putting an end to bodily pain, which is an inescapable part of the human condition. The Buddha was talking about the end of
suffering in the mind
—the theme of the rest of this book.
After the first noble truth points to the pervasiveness of suffering, the remaining truths start us down the road of what to do about it, how to work on the end of suffering in the mind. The second noble truth says that the reason for dukkha—which we’re thinking of as
mental
suffering, stress, anguish—is the truth of
tanha.
The literal translation of
tanha
is “thirst,” a concept not far from the popular conception of the second noble truth—that the origin of suffering is desire. I think of
tanha
as the seemingly ever-present mental states of “want” and “don’t want” in our lives. We want pleasant experiences; we don’t want unpleasant ones.
The third noble truth proclaims the good news that the end of dukkha is possible. And in the fourth noble truth, the Buddha sets out the lesson plan to accomplish this. That lesson plan is contained in the Eightfold Path. By following the Eightfold Path, we can learn to cultivate the wholesome and joyful mind states I referred to above. With the end of dukkha comes “enlightenment,” “awakening,” “liberation,” “freedom,” or “unbinding”—I recommend you pick the translation that resonates best with you.
We may not be able to complete the lesson plan of the Eightfold Path during our lifetime. That is, we may not become fully enlightened beings, but that glimpse of awakening, that moment of liberation, that taste of freedom is available to us all—and can take us a long way toward easing our experience of dukkha.
4
The Universal Law of Impermanence
Better a single day of life seeing the reality of arising and passing away than a hundred years of existence remaining blind to it.
—THE BUDDHA
ENDING DUKKHA IN THE MIND includes understanding what the Buddha called the “three marks of existence.” We have already been discussing the first mark: the fact of dukkha in our lives. The other two are impermanence (
anicca
) and no-self (
anatta
). When the Buddha began explaining these characteristics of our existence, he began with impermanence. It is a universal law, recognized in other spiritual traditions and in science as common to the life of every living being.
At a Spirit Rock retreat in the late 1990s, Joseph Goldstein gave what has come to be my favorite description of anicca as I experience it in everyday life: “Anything can happen at any time.”
Initially, I reacted to his statement the same way I reacted when I first heard
anicca
translated from the Pali as “Everything is impermanent.” I thought, “Yeah, tell me something I
don’t
know.” But when I didn’t recover my health, I began to deeply contemplate the meaning of “anything can happen at any time”—like getting sick and not getting better, like having to give up my profession, like rarely being able to leave the house. Yes, anything
can
happen at any time. Life is impermanent, uncertain, unpredictable, ever-changing.
How are we to find any solace in this universal law? The great Zen master Dogen offers a clue:
Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone, how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance all over the universe?
When we begin to see the truth of anicca
,
there’s a tendency to focus on “the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone” phrase in Dogen’s words. Having had to give up my profession still feels like that on some days. The challenge becomes finding the fragrance sent forth by those plum blossoms. Without the bitter cold of giving up my profession, I wouldn’t have the fragrance of Mozart and Beethoven wafting through my bedroom. (Of course, I
could
have enjoyed that fragrance before I got sick, but the fact is, I didn’t.) Without the bitter cold of having to stay in bed most of the day, I wouldn’t be so attuned to the changing seasons; I never realized they are on view right outside my bedroom window. I return to Dogen’s verse over and over for inspiration.
The writings of the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh have also helped me see the beauty inherent in the fact of impermanence. In his biography of the Buddha,
Old Path White Clouds,
Thich Nhat Hanh points out that impermanence is the very condition necessary for life. Without it, nothing could grow or develop. A grain of rice could not grow into a rice plant; a child could not grow into an adult. There are so many ways in which I’ve “grown” only because of this illness, from my newfound love of classical music, to a heightened compassion for the chronically ill and their caregivers, to an appreciation for the hard-working people who go unnoticed but keep our infrastructure running. (I see them from my house—delivering mail, climbing power poles, cleaning the streets—whether it’s over 100 degrees out or pouring rain.)
Weather Practice
Buddhist teachers use any number of English words to translate
anicca:
impermanence, change, unpredictability, uncertainty. All are characteristics common to existence—animate and inanimate. Two of those words,
uncertainty
and
unpredictability
, can be a source of a great deal of anxiety and suffering for us because we desire just the opposite: security and assurance. Here, I offer a practice that addresses these two aspects of impermanence
.
I call it “weather practice”; it was inspired by, of all things, the 2005 movie
The Weather Man
, starring Nicolas Cage as a character named Dave Spritz.
Dave is adrift in life, even though he has a steady job as the weatherman for a Chicago TV station. In reality, he’s just a “weather reader,” dependent on a meteorologist to tell him what to say. When the meteorologist gives him a forecast with an eighteen-degree variance, Dave complains that he needs something more concrete. The meteorologist responds, “Dave, it’s random. We do our best.” One day the meteorologist preps Dave for his TV spot by saying, “We might see some snow, but it might shift south and miss us.” When Dave protests that the viewers will want a more certain forecast than that, the meteorologist tells him that predicting the weather is a guess. “It’s wind, man,” he says. “It blows all over the place.”