The Noble Truth of Suffering

As the Buddha once said, all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering. Everything else that he taught is an elaboration on those two topics.

What’s sad is that a lot of people have trouble accepting what the Buddha had to say about suffering itself.

Some people have him saying that life is suffering, as a way of rejecting his teachings. They say, “Look at all the pleasures in life.” Well, there are pleasures in life, he doesn’t deny that. And he never said that life is suffering.

Some people have him say, “well, there is suffering,’ but that doesn’t tell you much. It’s good that he does point to the fact that suffering is an important problem, but he had a lot more to say about it. Yet there are even people who say that the Buddha didn’t really talk about suffering at all.

I read a book one time—a PhD. thesis—in which the author was saying the Buddha defines *dukkha *as the five aggregates, and the five aggregates are basically what you experience, which means that the four noble truths are not about suffering, they’re about experience.

Another scholar said that the way the Buddha names the four noble truths is ungrammatical. And because the Buddha would speak only in standard grammatical ways, the phrase “noble truth” must have been a later edition. This, of course, assumes that languages move in one direction only—from standardized to degenerate—which is obviously not the case. But if we listen to these scholars, we end up with nothing noble, no truth, no suffering—and you wonder why people would want to listen to such a teaching at all.

Actually, when the Buddha talks about what suffering is, he doesn’t say it’s the five aggregates, it’s the five *clinging-*aggregates. He points to problems that people recognize in their lives: the suffering of aging, illness, death, being separated from what you love, having to be with things you don’t love, not getting what you want. Then he boils the common denominator of all those forms of suffering down to the five clinging aggregates. The clinging is the problem, and that, he says, is something you want to comprehend.

Here again, there are some problems that people have: For some people, it’s all about simply acknowledging that there is suffering and then leaving it there. But when the Buddha defined comprehending, he explained is as meaning understanding suffering to the point where you have no passion, aversion, or delusion around it.

We might not think we have passion for our suffering, but remember that definition: clinging. We cling to things we desire. We cling to things we have passion for. We feed off of these things.

In fact, that’s one of the meanings of the word upādāna, or clinging: You feed. You take sustenance. So the Buddha is saying something pretty counter-intuitive—that we suffer because of the things that we cling to, the things that we feel desire for.

A lot of people don’t like to hear that, but he’s saying that if you take a noble attitude toward these things, you can separate yourself from the suffering. You really look at the things that you have passion for, and you begin to realize they’re ultimately not worth it.

If we just had the one noble truth, suffering, you might say, “Well, if that’s all there is, might as well accept it.” But there’s also the third noble truth: that it is possible to put an end to suffering. That’s the other topic the Buddha taught. You put an end to suffering by putting an end to the cause, which is craving. And you do that by developing the path. So there is this alternative.

When you look at suffering from the point of view of the four noble truths—all four of them—you take that noble attitude that you’re willing to step back from your likes and your dislikes, from your passions, and then you can do something about it.

That’s the whole point of the teaching: that you can do something about suffering. Now, sometimes it doesn’t require that you get the mind really quiet to see these things. You can go through daily life and see how there’s suffering: This is stressful, that’s stressful, dealing with other people.

There was once a French philosopher who said, “Other people are hell.” When you’re dealing with other people, you don’t really know them. You know what they say, you know what they do. You see it from the outside, but you can’t really see their intentions; you can’t really see their inner conversation. So you’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty.

But because you’re dealing with so many people when you’re outside, it’s hard to see your own contribution to the suffering. And that’s what the Buddha is saying you need to see: Suffering is not something you’re on the receiving end of, it’s something you do. You cling. You have passion for something.

The image of the first two noble truths tells you this. Tanhā, craving, can also be translated as “thirst.” Clinging, as I said, can be translated as “feeding.” You thirst for something, then you find it and you feed on it. At that point, when you’ve finally found something you can feed on, you’d think that finding something you can rely on would be a source of happiness. But that right there, the Buddha is saying, is where the suffering is.

So he’s asking you to look at your feeding habits. How are you feeding in such a way that creates suffering?

He talks about four kinds of food all together. There’s the physical food for the body, and then there are three kinds of food for the mind: the food of consciousness, the food of contact, and then the food of what he calls intellectual intentions, which can be translated basically as all your intentions. These are the things the mind feeds on.

If you don’t have these things, the mind goes pretty crazy. If there’s no contact, if you get put into a sensory deprivation tank, the mind begins to lose its sense of reality. If you get put into a prison, and you’re in a cell where there’s no variety at any point during the 24 hours, there’s nothing new to be conscious of, again, you go crazy. If you can’t use your intentions, if you have no sense that your intentions can make any difference in life, you go into a severe depression.

So these are the things the mind needs, feeds on, and yet, even though we realize that we can’t do without these things, still, they cause suffering. So again, you might think, “Well, even if there’s suffering there, I’ve got to put up with it.” But the Buddha says that if you train the mind, you can learn how to be without these kinds of food and not suffer. That’s what’s radical about this path.

Which is why when the Buddha decided to teach, he said that the doors to the deathless were open. That’s the third noble truth. That’s the end of suffering.

Then he said, “Let those with ears show forth their faith.” In other words, if you hear these teachings, and the possibility of a deathless happiness appeals to you, put some trust in the Buddha, follow his teachings.

As I said, so much of the four noble truths is very counter-intuitive: that you’ll be able to live without your cravings, live without your clingings. And this practice of training the mind can do that for you.

So getting started on the path is all based on faith, based on conviction. A lot of people don’t like the word faith. They take the attitude, “Didn’t the Buddha say not to believe anything that you can’t see for yourself?” That’s a very superficial reading of the Kālāma Sutta.

He actually said that when you put something into practice and see what the results are, then you take those results and you compare them to the teachings of the wise. Where they’re in agreement, you can put some faith in that. But even then, it requires an element of faith.

That’s because, if you’re going to know the real truth and to be able to judge it, you have to commit yourself to doing the path. That’s the only way you can judge it fairly—and that means you have to become a reliable judge yourself.

Fortunately, the qualities developed in the path will help you in that direction. You develop more mindfulness, ardency, alertness. You get the mind concentrated; you develop your powers of discernment. These are the things you’re going to need. To make them reliable, you base them on right action, right speech, right livelihood, so that you can become a reliable judge.

As he says, the Dhamma is nourished by commitment and reflection. So you really have to give yourself to it. And then really look at it from all angles. Only then can you be a judge, a reliable judge of what the Buddha had to say.

So you have to put some skin in the game. You can’t just say, “Well, I don’t agree with that,” or, “That doesn’t sound reasonable to me,” or, “It doesn’t fit in with my views.” If you really want to know what the Buddha had to teach, you have to commit yourself to following his instructions. Put up with the fact that the Buddha is saying that the reason you’re suffering is something you’re doing, something you like doing, and your willingness to take on that assumption would be a noble attitude to begin with.

This is what makes the truths noble. They require you to become a noble person, which is why there’s dignity in the path.

I’ve told the story of the Russian emigrée who, when I first came here to the States, was sitting in on a Dhamma talk I gave one time. I happened to mention the word “dignity.” Afterwards, she came up and said she’d lived in America now for ten years, and she had learned the word “dignity” when she studied English in Russia, but she had never heard it used here. Makes you stop and think.

You could probably say the same thing for the word “nobility.” We might talk about the nobility as a class, but nobility as a real quality of the mind and of the actions is something we rarely think about; especially in this society of ours where everything seems to be measured by how much money you can make and how much money you can throw around—basically giving in to your cravings and clingings, putting them in charge.

Some might say that what we’re doing here as we meditate is un-American. It certainly doesn’t fit in with the normal run of things, but we’re taking a noble attitude toward our suffering and a noble attitude toward our own responsibility for our suffering. How else are we going to become noble ones?

So when you see that there’s suffering in your life—stress, dis-ease—ask yourself, “What am I doing? What am I holding on to? What is it that I like that’s causing this suffering?” Then you’re doing the duty that the Buddha said should be done with regard to it, the duty that allows you to step back and separate yourself from it.

As the Buddha said, that’s what discernment is all about, seeing things as separate: the things you’ve latched on to, the things you’ve clung to. When you can see that they’re really not worth clinging to and you can separate yourself out from them, that’s when you really comprehend them.

That’s the task the Buddha sets for us. It’s up to us to really listen to him to hear what he really has to say, and then commit ourselves to testing as to whether it’s true or not.

He says it’s a noble truth. There are other people who say that he made no truth claims at all. The only way we’re going to find the answer to that question is through commitment and reflection.

Which I hope is what you’re doing right now.