The Age of the Sages

by Mark W Muesse

  * * *

  Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma in Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of theSamyutta Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom, 2000), 1846. ↵

  Kalama Sutta in Anguttara Nikaya 3.65, my italics, my translation.↵

  Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of theSamyutta Nikaya, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom, 2000), 1844.↵

  The Noble Search 19 in Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of theMajjhima Nikaya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 1995), 260.↵

  Kilesavagga 3.19 in Ven. Dhammika, trans. “Gemstones of the Good Dhamma.” Available at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/dhammika/wheel342.html. ↵

  12

  Why We Suffer

  The Four Noble Truths have often been compared to the way a physician might treat a disease. The Buddha thought of himself more as a healer with specific remedies for specific problems than as a philosopher with opinions about metaphysical questions. In the First Noble Truth, the Buddha determined the illness and its symptoms. In the Second Truth, he provided an etiology, a description of the cause of the disease. Once the source of the malady had been understood, he could say whether or not it could be treated. In the Third, he proclaimed that, indeed, a cure is possible. Finally, in the Fourth Noble Truth, he offered a prescription, a regimen for treating the ailment and curing the patient.

  “In the First Noble Truth, the Buddha determined the illness and its symptoms. In the Second Truth, he provided an etiology, a description of the cause of the disease. Once the source of the malady had been understood, he could say whether or not it could be treated. In the Third, he proclaimed that, indeed, a cure is possible. Finally, in the Fourth Noble Truth, he offered a prescription, a regimen for treating the ailment and curing the patient.”

  In the First Noble Truth, the Buddha identified the disease as dukkha, manifesting as a wide range of human experiences from the ordinary events of becoming sick, growing old, and dying to not getting what we want and getting what we do not want. The Buddha also suggested that dukkha manifests not only in particular experiences but in the whole of existence; recognizing dukkha on this level, however, requires persistent and attentive awareness.

  The Second Noble Truth

  In the Second Noble Truth, the Buddha declared that the root of dukkha is self-centered desire, or craving. He told the five monks, “Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extinction.”[1] This very compact statement requires a good bit of elaboration. It is important that we do so, because the second truth is at the heart of the Buddha’s vision and is the aspect of his teaching that most distinguishes it from other religious perspectives.

  Thirst

  Let us begin with the word craving, since the Buddha connects it so closely with the experience of suffering. The Pali word is tanha, which generally is translated as “desire,” but it carries an even richer significance when we realize that its literal meaning is “thirst.” In this context, of course, thirst is used metaphorically to denote certain qualities in the experience of desire. Thirst conveys an intensity that the word desiredoes not always express. Desire can range in meaning from a simple wish to raging lust. The meaning of thirst is more limited. Because water is essential to our lives, thirst connotes urgency and necessity. Yet the difference between desire as wish and desire as thirst is really only an issue of degree. A desire first conceived as a faint hope can easily and imperceptibly take on the quality of intense craving.

  Two aspects of the concept of tanha will help us grasp its significance in the Buddha’s thought. The first is the nature of the experience that arises out of it—in other words, the state of being conditioned by thirst. The second is the prior states of being that foster thirst in the first place. Exploring the first aspect helps to explain why tanha makes us prone to suffering, and the second helps us understand how to alleviate it.

  Attachment and Dukkha

  Why is the Buddha so concerned with desire? What is wrong with what seems to be such a natural human experience? The answer is that there is nothing wrong with wishing for and wanting things, per se. The problem arises when desires become self-centered and take on the intensity of craving. At that point, what begins as an object of wishing becomes a matter of necessity. We confuse want and need. Our beliefs about the world and ourselves convince us that this item—whatever it is—is something that we must have. “I must have this job”; “I must win this award”; “I must marry this person.” These beliefs might even make us think our well-being depends on acquiring or doing this or that thing. Or it may be that this item is something we already possess and that losing it would be devastating to our existence. Hence, we hold on to it with a white-knuckled grip. What was once mere wish has now become thirst, and our relationship to what we want or what we have is now a form of attachment.

  Attachment, or clinging, is an important concept in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Both traditions recognize it as part of the driving mechanism of samsara and as a source of suffering. Attachment essentially refers to the nature of the relationship we have to things, and by things, the Buddha meant not just material objects but also people, values, beliefs, ideas, power, status, experiences, and sensations. Although the Buddha does not say so explicitly in his first discourse, anything can become the object of attachment, including, as he well knew, his own teachings. The problem the Buddha saw was not with the objects of attachment, but with the nature of our relationships to them. Perhaps a good modern word to help us grasp the idea of attachment is addiction. In a very simple sense, an addiction is a situation in which our mind and body convince us that we cannot live without a certain thing we really do not need.

  The way that clinging gives rise to dukkha should be coming into clear view. In a world of constant change, there is nothing—nothing whatsoever—that can sustain our attachments. Anything we cling to is subject to change. When the objects of attachment are lost or extend beyond reach, we feel disappointment, grief, and tremendous insecurity. The Buddha said, “If one, longing for sensual pleasure, achieves it, yes, he’s enraptured at heart. The mortal gets what he wants. But if for that person—longing, desiring—the pleasures diminish, he’s shattered, as if shot with an arrow. [2] Having been conditioned to “desire and acquire” to allay this shattered feeling, we seek for something else to cling to, so the process continues. How many of us, when feeling sad or out of sorts, take to the shopping mall to buy something for ourselves? When the good feeling dissipates, we look for something else to restore it. The irony is that the more we try to attain security and happiness through acquisition, the more we suffer.

  Aversion

  The Buddha included in this concept of acquisition what might appear to be its opposite: aversion or repugnance. Feeling repelled by anything is effectively the same as attachment. Aversion is attachment of a different sort. It is a relationship to an object—albeit a negative relationship—that is difficult to relinquish. Aversion to anything depends on clinging to certain beliefs about it. In the children’s classic Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, one of the two central characters, Sam-I-Am, hounds the other character with a platter of green eggs and ham, insisting that he eat them. As Sam-I-Am pursues, the other fellow desperately tries to avoid him and the food, and in so doing, he ends up in a number of unpleasant and perilous situations. Finally, we learn that the guy who hates green eggs and ham has never even tasted them, and when he does, he decides he really likes them. His aversion, in this case, is based on an attachment to the belief that he does not like green eggs and ham, a belief that has no basis in experience, and it causes him to suffer just as much as clinging would.

  The Basis of Attachment

&nb
sp; The Buddha’s answer to the dual dangers of clinging and aversion was equanimity, the Middle Way between the two extremes. To realize this state of equanimity requires that we inquire further into the dynamics of attachment and antipathy. What drives craving in the first place?

  The simplest and most precise answer to this question is this: we misapprehend the nature of the world and ourselves. Many Buddhists writing in English and many translators of Buddhist texts call this “ignorance,” to render the Pali word avijja. Ignorance suggests a lack of knowledge, and certainly that is part of the problem. But in addition to not knowing, avijja suggests the further imposition of wrong ideas and beliefs onto reality. Not only do we fail to know reality, we also misknow it.

  Fundamentally, our misknowledge is the attribution of permanence and substantiality to impermanence, to view as a thing a reality that is, in fact, a process. For the Buddha, change is constant and persistent. Even an object that seems solid and enduring is subject to moment-to-moment change. We would all agree that in a hundred or so years, the object may be reduced to dust, and we grant it impermanence in that way. But the Buddha would contend that from one moment to the next, this so-called solid structure is in continuous flux, no matter how permanent it may seem to be. With the advent of quantum physics, the Buddha’s view of the physical universe seems to be confirmed. Current research suggests that the basic units of the physical universe are vibrating strings of energy. While not all scientists agree with this particular theory, there does seem to be consensus that the foundational elements of the world are more like energy fluctuations than solid, substantial things. If we had the capacity, we might perceive all objects as masses of vibrating energies. Like modern physicists, the Buddha viewed the cosmos as a complex array of processes rather than a set of things. So the Buddha is not just saying that things change; he is saying that change is the only thing there is.

  Of course, many people will acknowledge the reality of change and will wonder what is so terribly insightful about this claim. The Buddha’s innovation is in the thoroughgoing way he applies this concept. Many persons who acknowledge the world’s transience still declare part of existence to be exempt from change. The concept of god is one such effort; the concept of the atman, as we saw in the Vedanta tradition of Hinduism, is another.

  Not-Self

  Perhaps the Buddha’s most distinctive contribution to the world’s religious thought is his rejection of this belief. According to his Dhamma, there is no permanent, immortal, substantial soul or self. It is nowhere to be found. This feature of the Buddha’s thought is called anatta in Pali, but the Sanskrit term makes a clearer impression. The Sanskrit anatman makes evident that the Buddha is denying the atman, the Hindu idea of the true self. Both anatta and anatman are translated as no-self or not-self.

  “According to his Dhamma, there is no permanent, immortal, substantial soul or self. This feature of the Buddha’s thought is called anatta in Pali, but the Sanskrit term makes a clearer impression. The Sanskrit anatman makes evident that the Buddha is denying the atman, the Hindu idea of the true self. Both anatta and anatman are translated as no-self or not-self.”

  Of all the intriguing aspects of the Buddha’s vision, anatta must surely be the most difficult to understand, even for Buddhists. What the Buddha meant by this term has been greatly debated throughout the history of Buddhist philosophy. It should help to remember that fully realizing the truth of anatta, according to the Buddha, depends on gaining the insights disclosed in enlightenment. Like the idea of dukkha, anatta cannot be completely understood until one is awakened as the Buddha was.

  Most interpreters of Buddhism refer to anatta as a doctrine, but it is better understood as a practice. By using the term practice rather than doctrine, we can more easily see anatta as the systematic denial of any effort to conceptually pin down the nature of the self. It is not a concept, but an anti-concept. Anatta is a denial of a belief rather than a belief itself. It does not set forth anything positive. The moment we conceive of anatta as a concept, we have placed an obstacle in the way of its realization.

  In one of his discourses, the Buddha discusses how the concept of self can lead to fruitless speculation and contribute to our suffering. Here he explains why he does not advance an alternative view of the self, rather than merely denying others. This passage also indicates the variety of perspectives circulating in the Indian Axial Age.

  “This is how [the unawakened person] attends unwisely: ‘Was I in the past? Was I not in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what, what did I become in the past? Shall I be in the future? Shall I not be in the future? What shall I be in the future? How shall I be in the future? Having been what, what shall I become in the future?’ Or else he is inwardly perplexed about the present thus: ‘Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where will it go?’

  “When he attends unwisely in this way, one of six views arises in him. The view ‘self exists for me’ arises in him as true and established; or the view ‘no self exists for me’ arises in him as true and established; or the view ‘I perceive self with self’ arises in him as true and established; or the view ‘I perceive not-self with self’ arises in him as true and established; or the view ‘I perceive self with not-self’ arises in him as true and established; or else he has some such view as this: ‘It is this self of mine that speaks and feels and experiences here and there the result of good and bad actions; but this self of mine is permanent, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change, and it will endure as long as eternity.’ This speculative view, bhikkhus, is called the thicket of views . . . the fetter of views. . . . Fettered by the fetter of views, the untaught ordinary person is not freed from birth, ageing, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair; he is not freed from suffering, I say.”[3]

  Rather than put forward another view of self, the Buddha simply indicates that the concept of self is an unskillful and unwholesome way of thinking about human beings. We might use the word self for linguistic convenience—such as the reflexive myself or yourself—but we should never believe that it refers to anything substantial or permanent. But neither should we think that anatta means that the Buddha denies our existence or suggests that human life is an illusion or unreal. We are real, but not in the way we think. The Buddha’s denial of self suggests that no concept whatsoever is capable of expressing the reality of who we are.

  The Buddha’s understanding of the profound impermanence of reality is the basis of anatta and is much of the reason why who we are eludes conceptualization. Unlike many other thinkers, he applied the idea of change to every aspect of the human person. Thus, the Buddha’s description of the human, at least initially, sounds extremely negative. The so-called self is not a thing; it is no-thing, nothing. It is insubstantial; it lacks permanence and immortality. But on further inspection, it is clear that the Buddha’s view was not negative. He was merely attempting to disrupt our old habits of thinking about who we are.

  The Five Aggregates of Being

  Rather than viewing the person as an immortal self housed in a perishable body, the Buddha saw the human as a complex of interconnected and ever-changing energies or forces. He called these the Five Aggregates of Being. Together, these five processes wholly constitute what we call the human being. They are, first, the aggregate of matter, which refers to our physical makeup, changing by the moment as cells die and are replaced. The second aggregate is sensations or feelings. By this, the Buddha meant the tonal quality of our experiences, the way we automatically judge experiences as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. These judgments condition our tendencies of attachment and aversion. Like all beings, we seek out the pleasant and try to avoid the unpleasant. The third aggregate is perception, which means not only what we sense but also what we understand it as, what is known as apperception. The fourth aggregate is mental formations, which are the sources of desires, craving, and intentions. This component is the source of karma fo
r the Buddha. Hence, as long as there is craving, there will be rebirth. Finally, there is the aggregate of consciousness, which is the process of awareness.

  Nothing about any of these components endures. At any given moment, whether we are aware of it or not, our perceptions, our thoughts, our bodies, our consciousness are all in flux. Most importantly, there is no permanent subject or agent underlying these processes. An old Buddhist quip captures the idea exactly: “There is thought but no thinker; there is feeling but no feeler.” Thinking is real, feeling is real, but there is no subject or self who experiences them.

  The soul or self is simply an illusion, an unsubstantiated belief. Yet it certainly seems real, and most of the time we act as if it were real. We can compare the Buddha’s view of self to the appearance of a rainbow. A rainbow is not a substantial reality in the way it appears. It is an optical illusion, created by the convergence of various conditions including sunlight, moisture in the air, and the physical position of the observer. When these conditions change, the rainbow disappears. No one can ever reach the end of a rainbow, because the observer’s position will change, and the illusion will dissipate. To the Buddha, the atman is the same thing: an illusion supported by various changing conditions. This is why no one is able to identify or pinpoint the essential self.

  But we certainly develop the habit of ascribing reality to this illusion. And therein, the Buddha says, our problems arise. Believing in a permanent, substantial self is not a harmless misperception; it is actually the root of what causes us to suffer. To believe in a real self sets in motion a series of thoughts, words, and deeds that precipitate anguish, misery, and disappointment. When I think this “self” is ultimately real, rather than a habitual construct of the imagination, I begin to identify with it and make it the center of the universe. I do my best to protect it, to make it more secure, to ensure its existence. I develop beliefs that relieve my anxieties about my possible nonexistence and feel threatened if anyone challenges those beliefs. I may seek to enhance the status, prestige, and power of this self. I try to maximize its pleasurable experiences and minimize its painful ones. I develop the qualities of pride and conceit. I feel lonely and separated from others. When unwanted and undesirable things come my way, I feel cheated and unfairly treated: “Why me? I don’t deserve this!” And on it goes. Taking the belief in self seriously leads to desire and aversion, which condition attachment and clinging to an impermanent world. And that is why we suffer.