The Four Noble Truths

Pain, in its myriad forms, is often the entry point for practice. Tragedy and heartbreak, discontent and unease, something among these inspires us toward something different. The Buddhist path offers a path out of the pain by transforming our relationship to it.

In this talk offered for the Boundless Freedom Project, Matthew uses storytelling and personal experience to explore the ways that the Four Noble Truths might unfold in a person's life.

Transcript

So tonight,

I'm gonna get back to the basics a little bit.

Talk about the Four Noble Truths,

Talk about suffering a little bit,

You know.

As most of you know,

I first started practicing the Dharma when I was in prison.

I guess technically,

I started practicing the Dharma when I was still in the county jail at Elmwood,

But then I sat with my first Sangha when I was in Folsom State Prison.

But that isn't where I first encountered the Dharma.

The first time I encountered it was in a college course in my early 20s.

It was,

I think,

Like a three-quarter kind of series of courses that just surveyed all of Eastern philosophy,

And so it was an academic setting,

You know.

And there was a Buddhist segment that talked about the Four Noble Truths,

Talked about the Eightfold Path,

Talked about the different lineages and traditions,

But I wasn't getting taught by a Dharma teacher.

I was just,

If anything,

Just kind of having to memorize the Four Noble Truths,

Memorize the Eightfold Path,

You know,

Good enough for taking an exam or something.

But while I was studying the Dharma in that way,

There was something that resonated with me.

There was something that felt really truthful.

It almost felt like I was remembering something,

Like I was hearing something that I'd known my whole life but it was,

For the first time hearing,

Put into words.

At the same time,

I saw the Four Truths and the Eightfold Path as a treatment for pain and suffering,

And at the time,

I didn't think I needed the treatment.

You know,

I didn't think I was suffering enough to do anything about it,

So I kind of just packaged it up and I kind of filed it away somewhere,

Somewhere in my mind for,

You know,

Kind of like in case of emergency,

Break glass.

The Dharma's kind of like behind that glass when I need to break it.

And it wouldn't be too many years later that I would need to break the glass and pull the Dharma out and start practicing it.

There came a point,

I wanna say it was about three years after taking that college class when,

You know,

My best friend commit suicide.

I relapsed on drugs.

I went on a really good bender.

I was arrested again,

And I was facing,

At the time,

A few hundred years in prison.

My then wife was leaving me.

Things felt a little grim,

Right?

Suffering was enough for me to maybe pick up the practice,

To give it a shot.

And,

You know,

I think in my case,

It's not always the case for everybody,

But I think in my case,

Desperation was my gift.

I was in a place,

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that I wanted to die.

That's where I was at at the time.

And so my attitude with regards to,

Not just the Dharma,

Like trying to work a program of recovery as well,

My attitude towards these things was essentially they can't possibly get any worse.

So the worst thing that could happen is nothing.

So I'll try it.

And that's why I tried it.

And so I saw the Dharma as a way out of pain,

As a way out of suffering.

A few days ago,

The meditation teacher,

Dharma teacher,

Ralph De La Rosa,

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with him,

But he passed away suddenly over the weekend.

And he says in his book,

Outshining Trauma,

At the surface level,

We are all looking for a way out of pain,

A way to make sense out of a confounding world.

Yet underneath that,

We tend to be looking for permanent freedom,

For the rapture of unadulterated experience,

For flow states,

To feel loved and held,

And a sense of expansion and meaning and purpose.

In order to open the heart,

We must turn toward the very pain and confusion we prefer to get away from.

It is in allowing our hearts to break open that we will find what it is we are truly seeking.

The antidote to pain is discovered through relating to the pain itself.

We move through heartbreak by letting the heartbreak,

Heartbroken feelings and reality in.

We don't just let our hearts break open stupidly or in an ill-informed way.

Rather,

The magic is to place the pain,

Shame,

And fear in the cradle of the open heart.

In this way,

What might start as a frustrating paradox can shake out to be quite good news.

And this paradox,

Of course,

That he's pointing towards is that the only way out of our pain is into it.

The only way out of our suffering is into it.

And as most of you know,

The first noble truth is the truth of suffering.

And I don't think very many of us came to practice because everything was fine,

Particularly those of us in convert communities.

And so we picked up the practice because something wasn't working,

Right?

And so our entry point,

Our gateway,

Kind of our raison d'etre,

Our reason for practicing is it hurt.

Something hurt.

And so we have this first truth,

The first of four,

The truth of suffering.

And of course,

The Buddha tells us that birth and aging and illness and death are all suffering,

Not getting what we want,

Losing what we want,

Getting what we don't want,

All this suffering,

Right?

It's a hard truth to swallow.

The feminist activist Gloria Steinem said,

The truth will set you free,

But first it will piss you off.

And this word we're translating as dukkha,

Or excuse me,

This word we're translating as suffering is dukkha.

But sometimes we can,

Sometimes the word suffering feels a little bit dramatic for the full spectrum of what we mean when we talk about suffering,

When we talk about dukkha.

And so sometimes it's translated as unsatisfactory or stress.

The word itself actually refers to a misaligned hole in a wheel.

So that when you put the axle in the wheel and you try to ride in a cart,

The ride is bumpy.

So if you're riding,

Maybe I shouldn't say cart,

We don't ride in carts very often.

I could have said chariot,

We don't do that either,

But it could be a car or a train.

The point is,

Is if the axle and the wheel aren't lined well,

It's a bumpy ride.

And so this first noble truth,

If you want,

Could be the truth of the bumpy ride.

And the whole spectrum of suffering is built in there.

It's not just mayhem.

It's not just loss and death and grief.

It's traffic,

It's impatience.

It's adjusting our posture when we're meditating.

It's the itch that we scratch that becomes another itch that we scratch that becomes another itch.

These are all the subtle and greater forms of dukkha.

A couple of years into my last prison sentence,

I was stating my cell at Folsom.

I remember it was a winter morning and my celly had gone to yard so I could have some cell time by myself,

For those of you who don't know,

We sometimes,

When we're in prison,

Trade off.

One person goes to yard,

One does it.

That way you can have quiet time in your cell.

And so it was my cell time on a Saturday morning and I sat on the toilet seat,

Which is actually just a chair,

And I made myself a cup of freeze-dried Folger's coffee.

And I remember it was gray outside through that kind of like the dirty windows at Folsom and a guard walked by on the catwalk holding a gun.

And there was just something so stark looking through bars at the man who was charged with guarding me.

And something just welled up inside of me.

I said to myself,

Why didn't anybody tell me it would hurt this much?

And what was happening for me is that even though I picked up the practice almost two years earlier,

The first noble truth was still percolating for me.

I was still fighting to a certain extent.

I was still fighting kind of the harsh reality.

I was fighting the notion of suffering.

And I felt betrayed,

I guess.

You know,

I felt,

I felt like people had lied to me.

I felt like growing up,

Nobody told me,

Well,

Matt,

When you get older,

It's gonna hurt.

There's gonna be laws and people are going to disappoint you and the ones you love are going to die.

Nobody said that to me.

And maybe I was sheltered,

I don't know.

It's almost as if we were born with a manual,

Like an owner's manual for the human body,

For the human condition,

Like somewhere in the introduction or at least one of the early chapters,

It would mention all of this,

Right?

You're gonna get sick.

You're gonna get old.

You're gonna get disappointed.

These things are going to happen.

And this is why,

Of course,

The truth might piss you off.

But there came a point in my practice when I started to realize that it was my stories about prison that were getting in the way.

Not so much the prison itself,

But I was suffering a great deal because I actually felt like I was supposed to suffer.

I felt I had an identity around suffering.

I had an identity around being angry at my circumstance.

And it was around this time that I started to,

I suppose,

Work with the task of the first noble truth.

And so while there is the first noble truth,

The truth of suffering,

The task is to understand it deeply,

To accept it,

To recognize that this discomfort that we encounter is a feature rather than a failure.

It's not a glitch in the matrix.

It is the matrix.

And as we practice and we sit on a cushion and we take it off the cushion and we meet our suffering with acceptance and we meet our suffering with a kind heart,

We meet our suffering with non-judgment,

Not personalizing suffering,

We might begin to start to tease apart the suffering that is inevitable,

Which we might wanna call pain,

And the suffering that is avoidable,

Which is what we do with it.

And this,

Of course,

Leads to the second noble truth,

Which might also piss you off.

And this is the origin of suffering.

And the origin of suffering according to this truth,

According to the Buddha,

And in my experience is craving.

And the word that's translated as craving is tanha,

Which also means thirst.

And what this truth points towards,

And I think it's built into the word thirst.

You could almost think of it as hunger as well.

We all know,

And we know what thirst feels like.

We know what hunger feels like,

And we know the desire to quench it.

But then built into the quenching is the understanding that it will need to be re-quenched again,

Just like I keep having to have these sips of water as I've talked to you and my mouth gets a little bit dry,

I keep having to re-quench,

Like the micro-dukkha,

The micro-suffering in my mouth,

Right?

So craving becomes this thing that we keep temporarily satisfying,

Temporarily quenching,

And it just initiates a whole new phase of craving again until it reaches a tipping point of suffering,

And then we quench it again,

Over and over again.

Of course,

This craving,

This thirst can be subtle or it can be gross,

Right?

A lot of the subtle cravings we experience throughout the day,

The subtle discomforts we may not notice,

We might be standing outside,

And if we're not paying attention,

We won't notice that we're actually shifting our weight from one foot to the next throughout the day if we're standing.

This just subtle,

Constantly adjusting and turning away from the world and turning the dials for our experience throughout our days.

And in its grosser forms,

We know what craving is like.

I want really good food.

I want television.

I want to check out.

This is painful.

It must go away.

I cannot be happy unless it does.

This is pleasant.

I must have it.

And so as we've been working with suffering and kind of teasing apart the inevitable versus the avoidable,

We might start to notice a relationship,

Particularly with the avoidable suffering and our craving.

We might start to notice that a lot of our suffering comes as a very avoidable type of suffering.

And this isn't to say that the pain in the leg doesn't happen.

I'm just using that as an example.

The pain in the leg when it goes to sleep while meditating,

Of course the pain happens.

We likely won't die because of the pain though.

But I can tell you when I'm sitting in meditation and I've got that pain in my leg,

The craving for it to go away,

The wishing for it to go away,

The desire for it to go away and the struggle to either not do it or to just hope the meditation ends soon because I don't want to move,

Whatever the circumstance is,

Like that's the suffering that's avoidable.

Can I let go of that craving?

I was on social media the other day and having a conversation with just some random dude.

And he was talking about smoking cannabis,

Why he does it.

And he said something along the lines of he doesn't have a desire to make it hurt more than he needs to.

And he was essentially telling me that he doesn't want to be in pain.

He doesn't want to suffer.

And so he smokes.

And it was a curious way that he phrased it.

Because I really clued into that sentence.

I don't have a desire to make it hurt more.

I really kind of like clued into that word desire.

And I responded to him.

I said something like,

I too,

I don't want to hurt more than I have to.

Nobody does.

But with my practice,

The way that I try to address suffering is that I turn my attention towards the wanting rather than the hurting.

And so though we begin with the hurting and we begin with the suffering,

We can start to see the wanting that is built into it.

And that wanting can come in the form of actually grasping after things that are pleasant.

And the wanting can come in the form of actually trying to push away the stuff we don't want around.

But it's a wanting nonetheless.

And so the Buddha talks about this craving as a goal of the mind.

Going after pleasant things.

He talks about this craving as wanting to be something and be someone.

And then wanting pain and unpleasant things to go away.

So the task with the second noble truth with craving is to abandon it.

Easier said than done,

Of course.

The goal,

Of course,

Is to perhaps get to a point where we see the craving clear enough,

With enough clarity and with enough wisdom that letting go isn't a task,

That letting go doesn't take a lot of effort.

It's kind of like,

Would you go put your hand on a hot stove?

Like,

No.

Because you have enough wisdom to know that you're going to get burned.

So the practice in a way is directed towards seeing clearly enough that letting be and letting go follows naturally.

It doesn't have to be forced.

Which leads to the third noble truth.

And the good news here is that we are kind of past the truths that piss us off.

The first two,

There's pain and suffering.

The second one is you're totally complicit in it,

Right?

It's a feature and you're complicit in it.

Like,

Why does it have to be complicated like that?

That's Buddhism in a nutshell though,

Right?

It's not your fault and it's your responsibility at the same time.

But this third noble truth is the cessation of suffering.

The Buddha calls it the remainderless fading away and cessation of the same craving.

The giving up and relinquishing of it,

Freedom from it,

Non-reliance on it.

And this process begins as we're working with craving.

This process begins through the gradual abandonment that's happening in the second noble truth.

And sure,

In Buddhism,

There's kind of this final cessation,

Right?

We call this nirvana.

There's this final extinguishing of craving,

This final extinguishing of suffering,

But it's not an all or nothing thing.

It's not like you just have a world full of craving and terrible suffering,

And then one day it all comes to an end.

We do consider this a gradual path.

We can let go progressively,

Day by day,

Moment by moment,

Sit by sit.

In an individual sit,

We might experience an itch.

We might experience some form of discomfort,

And we look close enough at it that the craving and the wanting dissipates for a moment.

And maybe it comes back a moment later,

Or maybe it doesn't.

But in our practice,

We can begin to see the freedom that arises,

The joy that arises,

The calm that arises in those moments when we've let go.

Even if we pick it back up again a moment or minutes later,

We can start to bring attention,

Not just to the suffering,

Not just to the craving,

But to the joy and the freedom in its absence.

That's the good news.

It's not bad news.

That's the good news.

Like there's freedom available here now.

There's a refuge here.

And now.

And so the fourth noble truth,

Here's how,

The path.

And so the fourth noble truth is essentially what we do to taste that freedom.

And most of you are likely familiar with the Eightfold Path,

Right view,

Right intention,

Right speech,

Right action,

Right livelihood,

Right effort,

Right mindfulness,

And right concentration.

And of course,

We don't have time to go through in depth all eight folds of the path.

You could argue we don't have time to go through the Four Noble Truths tonight.

I mean,

You can spend your whole life on these things.

But this Eightfold Path is often separated,

Kind of categorized into three parts.

So we have Sila,

Which is ethics and integrity.

We have Samadhi,

Which is meditation.

And we have Panya,

Which is wisdom.

And so with Sila,

We essentially set the intention of non-harming,

We set the intention of not harming with our speech,

With our actions,

Of not harming with the things we have to do to put food on our table or a roof above our heads.

This is the foundation of practice.

A mind that is harming is a mind that is not harming.

A mind that is not harming is going to have a very difficult time becoming still enough to see clearly.

And it is through practicing Sila that we not only develop the calm of mind,

We develop the joy of blamelessness.

And that calm mind and that joy together are nutriment for practice,

For meditation,

For Samadhi,

For the second category.

And with Samadhi,

We set the intention to cultivate wholesome states of mind and to avoid unwholesome states of mind.

And with mindfulness and concentration,

We begin to see more clearly essentially what we've been talking about tonight,

Suffering and its cause and its cessation.

Just the whole of the path,

Suffering,

Its cause and its cessation.

And it is in cultivating and developing this meditation,

The Samadhi portion of the Eightfold Path that we begin to experience the joy of tranquility,

The joy of an undisturbed mind.

And so this joy of blamelessness and this joy of tranquility feed into the third portion of the Eightfold Path,

Panna,

Wisdom,

Which is right view and right intention.

And wisdom is defined here as essentially seeing clearly,

Having practiced this meditation practice,

Mindfulness practice,

Concentration,

The mind becomes still enough that we can see clearly the truth of suffering,

The truth of its origin of suffering and the truth of the cessation of suffering.

And we get to taste the joy of insight and the joy of letting go.

So the word for the Four Noble Truth is magga,

Which means path,

It's translated as path.

And there's like a particular quality of a path that I think is important here is,

A path implies something that has been traveled before.

If you go hiking in the hills around here,

Above San Jose,

There's these,

You know,

The grassy hills,

You can look through the grass and you'll see deer trails,

Places where the deer or the rabbits or all of the above had figured out,

Like this is the best way to traverse this set of hills and get from point A to point B.

And they all just end up taking that same trail over and over again.

You don't see just kind of like a mishmash or like a patchwork across the hills,

You see these very clearly defined paths and that's what the Eightfold Path is.

And the path becomes apparent and clearer the longer we walk on it.

And it comes with the added benefit of it becomes clearer for other people,

The longer we walk on it.

I'm not entirely sure which one's more important.

And so the hope with practice is that we might begin to recoil less from our suffering and become more curious.

The hope with practice is that we might begin to see most of the forms of suffering we experience as really ways of the mind trying to keep us safe.

And because the mind is trying to keep us safe,

We can have compassion for it.

But as a teacher once said that,

I don't remember who said it,

But I'm gonna quote them anyhow.

We are hardwired for survival,

But we are not necessarily hardwired for happiness.

And so we might have compassion for the mind that is trying to keep us safe and recognize that the mind may not be keeping us free and is certainly not keeping us happy.

Though avoidance of pain may be our initial reason for practice,

Maybe our initial reason for like parting the weeds on the path,

It ceases to be less about avoiding pain and more about investigating it.

It ceases to be less about being free from pain and more about being free with pain,

Free despite pain,

Joyous despite pain.

And so we let go.

We let go and we let it in.

And we hold it gently and we hold it with love.

And as the late Ralph De La Rosa said in one of his few last posts on Blue Sky,

Pain is sacred.

Our troubles are what compel us to ask it deeper questions.

It is intending to our measure of sorrow that we transform our lives.

And because pain is sacred,

We also cannot hold onto it.

It is ours to work with for some time,

But then it must be returned to the earth.

I offer this for your consideration.

Thank you.

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