Understanding Suffering: The First Noble Truth

The Four Noble Truths are a core teachings of Buddhism. It claimed that even a child could understand what they are – and at the same time, an older person with lots of life experience might not understand their depths. Might be fixed in a view. So in this way the Four Noble Truths provide an ever-developing series of insight and perspectives for understanding our lives.

Transcript

So welcome to the beginning of a four-week series of talks on the Four Noble Truths.

So I'll be offering talks each week on one of the Noble Truths and this week will be on the first.

So today I'll say some introductory words about the Four Noble Truths in general and then we'll speak a little bit about the First Noble Truth.

So the Four Noble Truths are core teachings of Buddhism and it's claimed that even a child can understand what they are.

At the same time,

An older person with lots of life experience might actually not understand their depths because of a fixed view.

Sometimes a fixed view can interfere with understanding.

So what's so beautiful about these teachings is they provide an ever-developing series of insights and perspectives for understanding our lives.

Even though you may say to yourself,

Oh,

I know these teachings,

But do you know them now?

What is mindfulness now telling you about these?

There isn't just one teaching of the Four Noble Truths,

There are many.

And in the history of Buddhism there are different interpretations and applications on how these truths apply to our lived experience.

So the Four Noble Truths have to do with suffering and the end of suffering.

It's said that while addressing his suffering and that suffering that he encountered,

The Buddha was immersed in a noble search.

That's the way it's described in the suttas.

There's a nobility or a worthiness in addressing and meeting suffering and then finding our way through it and coming to the other side.

We don't address suffering to become greater victims or diminish ourselves in any way.

Instead,

We're looking at it as a dignified,

Ever-changing process.

The Buddha said that when he was looking for an alternative to suffering,

What he was looking for is long-term happiness,

A happiness that's not dependent on changing conditions.

So as the cosmology goes,

The Buddha was sometimes called the Great Physician.

So in these four endeavors or these four tasks,

As they've been called,

His diagnosis of the human condition was that there is suffering,

There is pain in this life,

There is an oppressive nature in experience,

And that the cause is reactivity,

Is grasping.

It's a contention with our moment-to-moment experience.

And then the prognosis is there's a possible end to this affliction of suffering and reactivity.

And the prescription is there's a path,

There's a way out of this endless cycle of reactivity and contention with moment-to-moment experience.

So the first task is we're asked to see the truth of suffering.

May the truth of suffering be understood.

So this is a different relationship than many people have with it.

You know,

The idea that we should stop and get to know it better,

Like,

Oh,

This is suffering,

To study it and investigate it,

That sounds like,

You know,

Counterintuitive.

We want to get rid of it.

We don't want to experience pain.

We want to turn it off.

We want to escape it.

We want to push it away,

Attack it.

Do something other than experience it.

And just to say that the purpose of this entire religion is not to suffer.

It's okay to wish for an end to suffering and to not suffer.

But one wise way of doing this is actually that counterintuitive pivot towards it.

Maybe we turn towards it from someplace within us that there is balance and there's ease.

Then we can be with difficulty and suffering so we can understand it.

The wording in the First Noble Truth in its simplest form is,

This is suffering.

But the full sentence often is,

One understand or one knows this is suffering.

And so the word to know,

You know,

Knowing that it's happening instead of understanding can suggest in some way that we understand like the whole ecology of suffering,

Like where it comes from,

All the elements of it.

And that's not the point.

Knowing implies something very particular just to recognize,

Oh,

Oh,

This experience is painful.

This experience is causing me to contract.

And so when we can actually see the arising of it,

We can actually meet it in a more balanced way.

Or at least,

At the very least,

Not adding any more suffering to it just by seeing it.

We're not reacting.

We're not attacking.

We're not pushing it away or getting swept away in anger or collapsing into despair.

We're able to sort of just sit upright,

Metaphorically at least,

Sit with and not collapse in or get pulled into whatever is causing us pain.

It's sort of like in the stories of the Buddha,

You know,

When he right before his awakening,

He touched the earth and like he would say,

I see you Mara,

Mara being this sort of like the embodiment of all that suffers,

All that pain,

All the clinging.

I see you.

I see this pain.

I see this difficulty.

And this is slow.

It's a slow practice that we build.

You know,

We're building our capacity always just to ground and center and root ourselves in our experience.

And we begin like this morning,

Just finding a place where we can breathe and maybe take some refuge and in the breath to be relaxed in a certain way and allow for the ruminating mind to be the ruminating mind and to look at it and say,

Oh,

So those are my top 10 tunes that keep replaying in my life.

And then come back to this rhythm that is always with us.

Some people find it really relieving to hear that the task of Buddhism is to meet suffering,

To see it.

Because perhaps,

And maybe it's one of you,

You may have been,

You know,

Raised in a family where we avoid or pretend or sweep things under the carpet and not look at the difficulty.

Everything's okay.

It's all okay.

It's all okay.

So to actually experience like,

You know what,

This is suffering.

Let's talk about it.

Let's be with it.

Not so we can suffer better.

That's not the point,

But that we can see it,

That it's a wave,

It's a movement.

So the task is to,

To understand or to see the suffering.

And the Pali word,

The link in the language of the Buddha is Dukkha.

I love this word Dukkha.

It really kind of says it all,

Doesn't it?

And it's translated in a variety of ways in English.

It has a different translations because of different angles or perspectives on the things that we call suffering.

So the most common translation is suffering,

But it's kind of in a broad umbrella that encompasses many different parts of the human experience because some suffering is mild and some is big.

So these different translations offer different perspectives.

I think it's important to say that the word Dukkha is an adjective,

Not a noun.

As an adjective,

The literal meaning of Dukkha is painful.

This pain is almost like a metaphor for all the forms of suffering that a human being can have.

Like whether it's psychological or emotional or experiential,

It's like,

Ouch,

Ouch.

And it's something that we all contract around,

Something that hurts.

And we can point to many things in our life where they have this ouch.

So there's a common teaching that things like birth and aging and sickness and death,

Those are Dukkha.

So birth is painful,

Old age is painful,

Sickness is painful,

Death is painful.

And now we're talking about something that we can all identify with.

Because birth is other things besides just being painful,

But it's also painful.

Old age is other things besides being painful,

But it's also painful.

Sickness is also painful.

Death and dying can also be quite painful,

But it's more than that too.

And sometimes Dukkha is translated in English as stress.

So here again,

Birth can be stressful,

Old age is stressful,

Sickness is stressful.

So this is the raw experiential association with the word Dukkha.

And this translation has the advantage of being more physical without evaluation.

You know,

There's no right and wrong or good and bad.

It's just stressful.

The idea that stress can kind of follow us around in all kinds of ways.

Stress often occurs when we're doing things that we're looking forward to or loving,

Like we're going on vacation,

There can be stress.

So to understand like the wide extent of which stress is part of our lives goes beyond what many people think of as suffering.

Now another translation of Dukkha is unsatisfactory.

And this has become pretty popular,

This translation.

But in a sense,

There's more,

Like it's intellectual and philosophical,

You know,

It's evaluative and like we're evaluating,

It has to do with making an evaluation.

So you have this in like our constructed intelligence understands like the direct experience and then we're evaluating this pain of direct experience and saying,

Oh,

This is unsatisfactory.

So it's not,

I don't know that it's sufficient.

Like with the translation of pain,

You don't have to explain in what way it's painful.

You just know it's painful.

Stress is the same way.

But unsatisfactory,

It's clearly more complicated,

Because it requires sort of an explanation or understanding beyond just the felt sense of pain or the felt sense of stress.

Something is unsatisfactory.

But Dukkha generally is just the uneasiness that we all experience.

It's the vulnerability.

It's universal as a human being on this planet,

You know,

Mainly,

I think that it's just our human nervous system registering that we're existing,

That we're here.

And it's a little shaky,

Because it can end at any time.

And we don't know when that is.

So there's this background anxiety in the human nervous system,

That something is around the corner,

And it's threatening.

So if we can remember this first fundamental truth,

That there is stress,

That there is pain in this life,

And it's not so personal,

It's not the only thing that's in life,

Then we actually don't suffer as much.

We understand that it's just part of this feeling shaky in our existence.

So I hope this explanation lays the groundwork for what's to come on Thursday.

And I always love returning to these core teachings,

Because I'm always referring to them in my own life.

So thank you.

Thank you for being a part of this,

And I look forward to our time together and any questions you may have.