Buddhist Basics: The First Noble Truth

“Life is suffering,” right? Actually, Buddhism’s message is that it doesn’t have to be. In this teaching on the first of the Four Noble Truths, we’ll talk about what the truth of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness) really means. The Four Noble Truths lay out the basic beliefs of Buddhism: that unenlightened life will never be fully satisfactory, that we keep suffering because we keep grasping at things and situations outside ourselves, and that there’s a way out of this mess.

Please note: This audio is ripped from a video.

Transcript

Hello fellow meditator,

And welcome to this teaching on the Four Noble Truths,

The foundational teachings of Buddhism.

If you'd like to enroll in my free email course on the Four Noble Truths,

Please visit my teacher page here on the app and click the link to my website.

It'll take you to a page where you can register for that course and other free resources.

Greetings friends!

In this episode I want to talk to you about the First Noble Truth.

It's the one people are most likely to think they know,

But often what people think of as the First Noble Truth is like,

Life is suffering.

And I'll explain to you at the end of this video why I actually don't think that's a very good interpretation of the First Noble Truth.

And before we jump into today's topic,

I just want to let you know that I have created a mini course on the Four Noble Truths.

It's free,

It offers teachings and guided meditations and topics for reflection,

So you can really kind of take all this stuff from your head into your heart and into your daily life and get benefit from it.

So please find that link in the notes for this episode,

Go grab that course,

And you'll get much more out of these teachings that way.

The Buddha often compared himself to a physician,

And he said basically his role was to diagnose the human condition,

To diagnose human suffering,

And to offer us a treatment for it.

And if you think of it that way,

Then the First Noble Truth is like the diagnosis.

It's the description of why we as humans who have not woken up to the nature of reality suffer.

And suffering here can be anything from really serious suffering,

Like losing a loved one,

Getting in a car wreck,

Or having some kind of terrible diagnosis,

All the way to just a sense that life could be better,

Or this is pretty good,

But am I really fulfilling my deepest desires in life?

So it has a wide range of meaning,

The word that's associated with the First Noble Truth,

Which is dukkha.

So suffering,

To begin with,

Isn't like a super great translation for dukkha,

Because it really only means that severe end of dukkha.

The mild end is just that sense,

Like for anyone else who's a Gen-Xer and watched The Matrix,

That sense that maybe we're all stuck in the Matrix and there's a real world to wake up to.

I like to use the word unsatisfactoriness to translate dukkha,

Or just say dukkha,

Because that has sort of the full range of meaning.

So I'll use those words interchangeably,

Unsatisfactoriness,

Or dukkha during this talk,

But please understand that I mean kind of the same thing by them.

So the basic problem,

The reason that we're never going to get external circumstances to completely line up and completely make us happy,

Is that we mistake the type of beings that we are and the type of world that we live in.

So there are like three really important characteristics of phenomena in Buddhism.

The first one is dukkha,

The fact that unenlightened life or unawakened life is just going to be unsatisfactory.

The second one is impermanence.

We often think and act as though the me of today is going to be the me of tomorrow and the me of five years and ten years from now,

And hopefully I'm going to live long enough to retire and then I'm saving thinking of all the things I'm going to want to do then.

So there's this assumption of continuity,

But the reality of the situation is every minute I'm breathing in and breathing out.

My body is exchanging molecules with the world around me like all the time and those changes are often so small that we don't notice them,

But when something big happens or changes in our lives it can seem so sudden.

It can really make us question our sense of stability and solidity.

And Buddhism's kind of scary answer is,

Well,

That stability was kind of only ever an optical illusion.

And the third of these three really important characteristics of the world and of ourselves according to Buddhism is that there's no inherent self in the way that we think of it.

So usually again,

If I think of myself in five years or ten years or whatever,

I'm thinking of more or less the same entity.

Like I have a social security number and I have a driver's license number.

Like I have these sort of identifying markers and I feel like there's something that those point to.

I feel like the kid who was born on my birth date is the same human in some way as I am now,

Even though like all the cells in my body have been changed out between then and now.

But there is continuity,

But it's not the same.

And this is a really important distinction.

I don't want to get too much into it in this video,

But because there's that continuity again,

Like I was talking about with impermanence,

Because the changes are so gradual or so subtle,

Usually we tend to think of ourselves as selves,

As something that's kind of like contained within our skin and that has a birth date and we're going to have an end date and that's it.

We're like this little unit moving through time and space.

And Buddhism says,

Actually,

We're really not,

You know.

Buddhism believes in multiple lifetimes.

Some schools of Buddhism believe in basically an infinite number of lifetimes that we've already lived.

So the idea that I am like an entity with a birth date,

I mean,

I've had like an infinite number of birth dates according to that like view of who we are.

So like this,

And also if you think about it,

Not just in terms of time,

But also in terms of space,

Like I just mentioned,

I'm breathing in and out every moment of the day where I am right now,

You can't see it,

But I'm surrounded by trees.

So like I'm offering what used to be my body to these trees in the form of carbon dioxide,

They're offering what used to be their body to me in the form of oxygen.

So how exactly do I draw a hard and fast line between myself and the world around me?

So that's another way in which we just mistake reality.

We mistake the type of beings that we are.

And because we mistake who we are and how the world works,

What we think is going to make us happy doesn't,

Or it makes us happy for a while,

And then the high wears off and we want the next thing.

And that brings me to the next important idea that I want to talk about in the context of the first noble truth,

Which is the idea of a treadmill.

And there's actually what's called a hedonic treadmill.

I'll put a link to some research and some writing on that idea again in the info box with this episode.

But basically the idea of a hedonic treadmill is that we want something nicer than what we have.

So like we're here and the next thing is here.

And we run a little harder to get that next thing and we get it and it's great,

But then it becomes normal.

So that buzz we got off of getting that new thing kind of becomes our new baseline.

Like for me,

This reminds me of the time when I bought an actual sports car.

It was a used Toyota Celica,

But it was like the most beautiful thing in the world to me.

I bought it.

It was amazing.

You know,

I drove it off the lot thinking like,

I'm not sure I should be allowed to drive this car.

I'm just not actually cool enough.

So like,

I was buzzing on it for a while until I got the first scratch on it.

And then I was like,

Oh man.

And it kind of broke the spell and it just became normal.

And if you think about it,

Whether it's a car or a phone or a house or a partner or whatever we're running after,

How long does the buzz of that newness really continue to like make us feel gratified?

How long does it take before we're finding the faults in our partner or we're looking for the next phone?

Whatever it is.

So that's the hedonic treadmill that just keeps us going.

Keeps us going after what's next.

And in a similar way,

We as humans are always grabbing after what's next.

We never seem to stop and notice that it doesn't quite bring us what we thought it was going to bring us.

Like if I bought a sports car thinking like,

I am investing this money so that I will have like a buzz every time I get in this vehicle for two months.

That's like a very different proposition from what you see in car ads where it's like,

If you buy this vehicle,

You will be a certain type of person.

So all of that is to say we're running after what we think is going to make us a certain type of being.

But Buddhism says,

Look,

There's no such thing as a solid substantial you.

You're always going to be changing.

So running after stuff doesn't mean we're going to catch it and be happy.

Avoiding the bad stuff doesn't mean that we'll always be able to avoid that.

And that's always going to make us happy.

How many times have you had a near miss driving or,

You know,

Some people get a terrible diagnosis and it turns out to be like a misdiagnosis.

And I know for myself,

The times I've almost been hit driving,

For instance,

I'll have this rush of like,

Oh,

Man,

That's so crazy.

I'm so glad that didn't happen.

I need to really,

You know,

Be grateful,

Be in the moment,

Take advantage of like the life that I have.

But how long does that last?

We just have such a habituation to looking to the next thing,

To getting bored with ourselves.

And it's just so hard to appreciate that we're not these little limited beings,

That there's something much deeper and more profound to us.

On the topic of trying to avoid or keep out the bad stuff that we don't want to experience,

A lot of that,

Again,

Is based on a sense of ourselves as this limited being who was born,

Who's going to die.

When we die,

That's it.

Like we are gone somehow.

If we think that,

Then death is the most terrifying thing ever.

But we know it's going to come for all of us.

On the other hand,

If we're able to recognize ourselves as much more than,

Much more spacious,

Much more sacred than these sort of little limited selves that we think we are,

Then it's much less of a big deal to contemplate the death of this body.

If you believe in literal rebirth,

Then our mind will go on in some form and become associated with a new body.

If you don't believe in rebirth,

But you believe in an afterlife of some kind,

There is still continuity.

So if we could recognize the continuity without putting a self on there,

Again,

We would just avoid so much of the suffering or the dukkha or the unsatisfactoriness that comes with this unawakened life.

So I want to come back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

Which is that the idea that life is suffering is the first noble truth.

It's really wrong.

And I want to tell you why.

It's basically because if life were suffering,

If suffering was like necessarily part of life,

Then you could never tease it out.

You could never imagine a life without any suffering whatsoever,

Which is exactly what the Buddhist tradition aims for.

It's what it describes in the third noble truth.

So life doesn't have to be full of dukkha.

Life can be completely free of dukkha.

That is what it means to wake up.

The word Buddha means like one who has woken up.

Any of us can become a Buddha.

That's the point of Buddhism,

Is to make a whole bunch of little Buddhas,

Because everybody's just waking up out of these delusions of permanence,

Of a self,

Of some lasting state of happiness that we could reach if we could just get our real life to like match someone else's Instagram account.

We have the potential for something so much vaster and more profound than a life that is limited and that necessarily includes dukkha.

So this is like the really,

Really good news,

Even in the first noble truth,

Which is the truth of dukkha,

Unsatisfactoriness,

That this is something we are causing.

And that doesn't mean,

In a Buddhist context,

That doesn't mean that whatever suffering we experience in this lifetime,

We deserve it or we brought it to us somehow.

It could mean that 500 lifetimes ago I was a Mongol and I killed a bunch of people's cattle and stole their horses and now my car gets broken into.

So it's not that I did something bad a long time ago.

It's that there's this continuity of cause and effect and a long time ago someone earlier in this chain of mind,

You might say,

Did something and now the results are coming to me.

So I want to be super clear that even though dukkha has a cause and the cause is our own actions,

It's not talking about one lifetime and it is not a form or shouldn't be used as a form of victim blaming.

But having said that,

The really good news about dukkha,

Unsatisfactoryness,

Having a cause is that we can stop it.

So that is where I'm gonna leave this today.

In the next episode I'm going to talk about the second noble truth which is the cause of suffering.

And if we can clearly identify the cause we can stop creating that cause and then we'll stop receiving the effect which is dukkha.

So thank you for joining me.

I hope this in some way contributes to you experiencing less dukkha in your life.

Again,

I hope you will grab the free mini course that'll offer you a deeper dive into all these topics and just kind of organize them for you with ways to really take them to heart,

You know,

To use them in your daily life.

And I hope that you will also join me for upcoming episodes about the third and fourth noble truths.

I hope you are well and I hope to see you again soon.

Reviews

Wonderful

Very interesting, thank you very much for sharing