The Second Noble Truth

This is the second talk in a four-part series on the Four Noble Truths. This talk explores the second truth that there is a cause to suffering and dissatisfaction and the cause is clinging. In this talk, we explore where we cling.

Transcript

So we're in our second week in our series on the Four Noble Truths.

And these are considered the central teachings of the Buddhist path.

The myth or the lore is that the Buddha's first teaching was to a group of five ascetics that he practiced with before his enlightenment.

And what he shared with them was the teaching of the four truths that he realized for himself.

And across this Buddhist path,

And all of the traditions that it's undertaken,

In all the countries that it's gone to,

They all rest on these four truths.

And even though there are different practices and different appearances and rituals,

They all believe in and derive their teachings from these four noble truths.

It is the most useful of frameworks to understand our life better.

Perhaps we've discussed these four truths before,

And that you're here on this call today to revisit them is a deep bow to you for keeping a beginner's mind.

These are the foundational teachings and framework.

And what's so interesting is the Buddha realized these truths through his direct experience.

So this framework of the Four Noble Truths,

It doesn't assume or require us to believe in something that can't be proven or can't be seen for ourselves.

This is something that we can discover for ourselves exactly like the Buddha.

And our discoveries,

These truths,

These discoveries are that there is pain in this life.

There's pain in this life,

Have you noticed?

And the cause is reactivity.

It's clinging.

It's contention with this moment to moment experience.

And there is a possibility of an end to this affliction of suffering and anxiety and reactivity.

And there's a path out of it.

There's a path out of this endless cycle of contention and reactivity.

So one of the central metaphors that the Buddhist texts makes reference to quite often is its reference to fire.

So dukkha,

What we talked about last week,

Dukkha,

The word that is most often translated as suffering or dissatisfaction,

Stress,

Dis-ease,

The pain of this life,

It's sometimes seen as fire.

It's a fire that's burning in us.

We are burning with the fire of dukkha.

The world is burning in a certain way.

And these fires,

They hurt.

The suffering,

This dukkha that we have,

If you look around the world,

The world is on fire.

There's so much pain,

There's so much distress,

There's so much stress that people are living under.

They say that in the United States,

That one in five children are living in hunger since the pandemic,

One in five.

Before the pandemic,

It was one in 10,

Still pretty big.

And so many people have lost their work right now and are having difficulty finding work.

So that fire of the hungry bellies,

For many,

Many people,

It's painful.

It's painful that this is the case right now.

So when the Buddha talks about suffering in the early text,

He uses this metaphor of fire over and over again.

The fires of greed in ourselves are wanting.

The fires of hatred,

We're seeing that play out quite vividly and forcefully and violently.

And the fires of delusion or confusion.

He talks about these powerful mental attitudes and motivations that human beings have.

And these motivations,

These compulsions,

When they are very compulsive and very strong,

They are like fire and they can destroy lives.

So the metaphor for suffering is fire.

So what fuels the fire?

This is our inquiry today.

Clinging.

Clinging is the fuel for the fire.

Clinging fans the flames of our suffering.

Clinging keeps it going.

Whenever there is reactivity,

That's adding more fuel to the fire.

So suffering arises from clinging.

That's the second noble truth.

If we cling to what's impermanent,

We will suffer.

I had a visceral experience of this the other day when I was working on this talk.

I went and I stood in the river by the house that we live by,

The Crystal River.

So if you're standing in the river and you try to stop the river's flow,

It's not going to work.

You could try to dam it and change the flow,

But it still will flow in the direction the dam will break.

So fighting the river doesn't work.

Clinging to the river of life that's changing,

Always changing,

Is guaranteed to be a source of stress.

It's guaranteed.

The alternative is to see this world of impermanence and change and relate to it in a different way.

So the changing world becomes the medicine of our life,

Not the illness,

Not the fire.

So what is it that we cling to?

In the traditional text,

It states that we cling to these what are known as the five aggregates,

These five fuels of suffering.

The five aggregates are really who we are.

The five fuels are the body,

Our body,

Our feelings,

Our perceptions,

Our mental formations,

And our consciousness.

And these five aggregates are constantly changing and unfolding.

And if we cling to them staying the same,

Then we'll suffer.

But if we allow these psychosomatic ways that we see ourselves,

They're just psychosomatic ways that we see ourselves.

We allow them just to flow,

Then we can find our ease.

Easier said than done,

Right.

So this week is the second noble truth of the arising of suffering.

One of the most common understandings is about the cause of suffering.

So there is suffering and there is a cause and the cause is clinging.

So when we look at the cause,

It's in our everyday life,

Right?

Something that I find useful is to ask the question,

What's the cause of this distress that I'm feeling?

That question can just open up the field,

Just to be able to respond to that question.

What's the cause of this distress that I'm feeling?

In the Pali Canon,

It's written that most people fail to see reality because of wanting.

They are attached.

They cling to material objects,

To pleasures,

To the things of this world.

This very clinging is the source of suffering.

Craving gives rise to dukkha,

Dissatisfaction.

By understanding and relinquishing desire,

We become free from suffering.

The path to full freedom is the abandoning of desire and craving.

Well,

That's a pretty tall order.

This makes you think that desire is actually a problem,

That letting go of desire is the aim.

It's not the desire that's the problem.

The desire itself is just part of being alive.

It's that we get hitched.

We get caught in the clinging.

So we don't want to create aversion to desire.

There's nothing wrong with desire.

That's why we're here.

We wouldn't be born without desire.

Without continued desire,

We would die.

There is a desire for love and connection and understanding.

And when people lose their desire to live,

They jump up bridges or they swallow pills.

So desire is not a problem.

It's innate.

So our exploration is to explore a wise understanding of desire.

The arising of desire is a basic thirst to exist.

And the metaphor as I mentioned in metaphor more because so much of the text is written in metaphor.

The metaphor for desire for craving in the Pali is a word called tanha.

And it literally means unquenchable thirst.

So this desire that's emphasized has characteristics of thirst.

Imagine what it's like to be parched,

Desperate for water.

And the compulsion,

The drive,

The preoccupation with getting something to drink can be all that you think about when you're desperately parched.

And this thirst is the cause of suffering.

The thirst has a compulsive quality.

There's a drivenness and addictiveness,

A compulsion that's part of the drive of desire.

If only,

It has an if only quality.

That's part of the reason suffering is involved with desire,

Because the desire has tension.

There's a loss of freedom.

Anytime we lose our freedom,

We suffer.

It's an inner burning.

In the Buddhist cosmology,

One of the psychic domains is described as the realm of the hungry ghost.

And the hungry ghost figures are depicted with these scrawny little necks and huge,

Huge bellies.

And if you've ever seen some early Buddhist art,

You will be able to identify the hungry ghost.

They're riddled with powerful desires that they can never really satisfy.

And so we all have some sort of version of the hungry ghost syndrome.

So in a very human way,

Desires are natural and wholesome.

And they're necessary for us to flourish and survive.

So in our mindfulness practice,

We're learning to look and to ask the question,

What is the cause of my stress?

Can we find out the cause?

It's like our meditation this morning.

Can we see what's happening inside right now and just be with it?

When we learn to let be,

We begin to see more clearly and let whatever it is evolve and show itself.

If it's pain,

We investigate,

We stay with it,

We get to know the flavor of it.

And often lo and behold,

It moves and changes.

So we learn to relax a little bit with what's happening.

So to stop and ask the question,

What is the cause of my distress,

My sorrow or my grief?

And there may be multiple causes.

But the causes that the Four Noble Truths are interested in is our contribution,

Our contribution to our suffering.

By how we thirst,

How we have compulsion,

How we have strong desires for something to exist or to have or to want,

Or a very strong compulsion for something to not exist,

To push it away and get rid of it.

So our first task is to recognize our stress and ask ourselves,

What am I contributing to this suffering?

How am I contributing?

What is my contribution to my own suffering?

There might be other people that you can say are the cause of your suffering.

But where you can have the most impact in this particular practice is to ask what my contribution is to it.

And to take a good look at that and to hold it in awareness and to understand it deeply.

As the meditative mind becomes quieter,

And we more and more live just in this present moment,

And as the meditative mind stops the activity of making so many stories,

And it's more and more just experiencing moment by moment what's happening in life,

At some point we see that all of our experiences are just experiences coming and going,

Appearing and disappearing.

So the Buddha said as an instruction to his monks,

Self concentration.

For those that have concentration will see things as they are.

They will see suffering,

The arising of suffering,

The ceasing of suffering,

And the practice of the ceasing of suffering.

It's interesting to me that again,

When referring back to these early texts which I like to do,

The Buddha said,

Like some hundreds of hundreds of times in the suttas,

He refers to how all experiences arise and pass away.

Nothing in our experience is constant.

He talks more about impermanence than the Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths are I think mentioned in four places,

Maybe three places,

Actually three places.

They're pretty thorough in the description,

But what he mentions more is impermanence,

The change that is always,

Always,

Always happening.

It's known as a liberating insight to see impermanence,

Just moment by moment arising and passing.

So the Buddha emphasized this over and over again,

This deep insight into impermanence,

Just really being able to see things come and go.

And it's liberating,

It's considered a liberating insight,

Because when we see things arise and pass in our own experience,

Then we have a much more clear sense of how we want to hold it,

Or how we resist what's happening.

When we see the appearing and disappearing of experience,

There's space in it.

And we start to see that there really isn't anything to hold on to.

It's like the river.

It's just in flow,

Just arising and passing,

Arising and passing.

And we start to learn in our meditation practice,

To allow things to come and go.

To let things be there,

And be there and be there and all of a sudden they change.

And then we take this practice into our life off the cushion.

Coming and going coming and going.

It's an experience of deep equanimity.

When we allow experience just to rise and pass moment by moment.

The non reactivity to impermanence arising and passing,

Life arising and passing,

Lends the mind to letting go in the deepest possible way.

Don't take my word for it though.

See for yourself.

So one of the ways of understanding these Four Noble Truths is not from the causes of suffering,

Not the conditions that lead to suffering,

But rather from this deep insight into the nature of suffering.

The nature of suffering is a process of inconstancy,

Of change,

Of coming and going.

And somehow seeing the nature of suffering,

It can be deeply liberating.

It doesn't require us to find the cause or the condition.

What is the cause of my suffering?

What is the clinging?

But there is just a deep letting go of the clinging and letting go of the craving.

It's not that we've understood craving or clinging.

It's not that we've understood the cause of it.

What we've understood is the changing in constant,

Impermanent nature of suffering.

Oh,

This is suffering.

It arises,

It will pass.

Let me watch the river flow.

So this understanding is that suffering is not an inherent part of the human experience.

But what we can do is we can learn to let go.

We can learn to let go.

And the more that I read these early texts,

It becomes clear to me that this was the Buddha's biggest insight.

It's all always arising and passing.

So it's another way of understanding the second noble truth.

All the understandings are great across the traditions.

But what I'm doing,

What we're doing together is expanding the range of how we use this framework of the Four Noble Truths so that we can understand our lives in a different way.

You know,

We're in different circumstances now.

Different ways could be useful.

So the Four Noble Truths are this central framework for organizing our human experience on this path of freedom.

So again,

From Ajahn Chah,

If you let go a little,

You'll have a little peace.

If you let go a lot,

You'll have a lot of peace.

If you let go,

Absolutely,

You'll have absolute peace and tranquility.

And he also said,

He also said,

Even though we can't let go,

We're aware of these states continuously.

Being continuously aware of ourselves and our attachments,

We come to see that grasping is not the path.

We know,

But we still can't let go.

But that knowing,

That knowing is 50%.

Just intending to let be and let go opens the door.

It's enough.

So thank you for your kind attention on the Second Noble Truth.

Reviews

Thank you🙏🙏

Just awesome. Thank you for unpacking and explaining lucidly.

Thank You. 🙏🙏🙏

very clear & helpful to deepen understanding. Thank you