According to legend, Lord Brahma himself appeared to persuade the Buddha to become a teacher. The Buddha said that ‘the world delights in the pleasures of the senses, but my teaching aims at the renunciation of all attachments and the destruction of craving’. He worried that people would not understand him. To this, Brahma apparently responded that there existed people with ‘only a little dust in their eyes’ who were likely to respond well to him.
When he finally overcame his doubts, the Buddha wondered with whom he should share his insights. He thought of his two gurus, Kalama and Ramaputra, but both of them had died in the previous six years. He then remembered the five Brahmins from Kapilavastu who had joined him briefly in his ascetic practices; he knew that they were staying in a deer park near Benares, and although they had denounced him for abandoning asceticism, the Buddha hoped that they would be receptive to what he had to say.
When, soon after his enlightenment, he set off for Benares, which lay several arduous days on foot away, the Buddha was only thirty-five years old. He had been a householder, a sramana and an ascetic. He had known sexual love, political power, the homelessness of a sramana, the trances of a yogi and the self-mortifications of an ascetic. And now after this range of human experience he had known what he thought was true wisdom.
A naked sramana, one of the Ajivikas who were extreme determinists, met him on his way to Benares, and was clearly struck by his confident mood. He asked the Buddha who his teacher was. The Buddha declared that he was the enlightened one, had no teacher and was a teacher himself. Instead of falling at his feet, the sramana merely said, ‘It may be so, brother,’ and walked away.2
If this wasn’t deflating for the Buddha, the initial response from his erstwhile companions at the deer park near Benares must have been discouraging. For, when they saw him approach, they decided neither to greet him nor to rise in his presence. But as he came nearer they sensed the state of grace that had come over him, and their resolve weakened.
They received the Buddha courteously. They took his alms-bowl and his robe and washed his feet. But when they addressed their former companion as a ‘friend’, the Buddha told them that he was now a tathagata arhat, an enlightened sage, and should be addressed as such.
The ascetics may have been sceptical, if not dismissive, of their fellow Shakya. They had last seen him breaking his vows and eating porridge; it had seemed clear to them then that his search for enlightenment had ended.
Wishing probably to persuade them, the Buddha went on to preach his first sermon, what came to be known later as Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma. He first sought to establish that he had already experimented with the extreme ways – the life of the householder with its sensual fulfilments and the asceticism of the sramanas – and what he taught was the Middle Way:
There are these two extremes, monks, which one who has left the world should not pursue. Which two? (On the one hand) giving oneself up to indulgence in sensual pleasure; this is base, common, vulgar, unholy, unprofitable. (On the other hand) giving oneself up to self-torment; this is painful, unholy (and also) unprofitable.3
He then explained the four noble truths:
Duhkha.
Samudaya, the arising or origin of duhkha.
Nirodha, the cessation of duhkha.
Marga, the way leading to the cessation of duhkha.
The first noble truth, from which the other three flow, is often taken to mean that life is duhkha, which in Sanskrit literally means pain or suffering. The second noble truth is that suffering is caused by trishna (craving), which binds us to the phenomenal impermanent world, and gives rise to rebirth. The third noble truth is that the suffering can be cured. The fourth noble truth lays down the eightfold path, which describes a journey from high moral behaviour to meditation to wisdom, and culminates in the cessation of suffering. They were:
Right View.
Right Intention.
Right Speech.
Right Action.
Right Livelihood.
Right Effort.
Right Mindfulness.
Right Concentration.
It is no coincidence that the four noble truths take the form of a medical diagnosis and cure. From his very first sermon, the Buddha tried to identify and then propose solutions to what he saw as the fundamental problem of life – suffering. His aims were therapeutic and ethical rather than metaphysical or theological. Pursuing them, he either ignored or denied just about every piety – God, soul, eternity – that was current in his time and was to form the basis of many subsequent religions and metaphysics in India and elsewhere.
He also refrained from proposing a new theology or dogma. It may seem that the four noble truths form part of Buddhist dogma, or creed, but the Buddha meant them to be a description of things as they actually are, self-evident things that we nevertheless do not see. It is why he didn’t seek to persuade. He spoke as if the fact of suffering was universal, felt by almost everyone alive; he also assumed that it was individual misperception or ignorance of the true nature of the self which caused this suffering.
Life in its normal course produced several forms of suffering: old age, sickness, death, and the mental and physical pain – depression, melancholy, grief – that couldn’t but be duhkha. This was the suffering that the Buddha had first witnessed when as a young sheltered rich man he saw old age, decay and death. As he put it, ‘birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, dying is suffering, sorrow, grief, pain, unhappiness, and unease are suffering’.
In nineteenth-century Europe, Schopenhauer chose such words to advance his view of Buddhism as an especially pessimistic religion. But the Buddha held out ultimately a promise of bliss; and he had much more in mind while speaking of this suffering. He meant also the discontent and unease that was caused by the impermanent nature of things. ‘Being united with what is not liked is suffering, separation from what is liked is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.’
This was the suffering that lies in wait while we know happiness, when something or someone we like changes, or an unpleasant event breaks into our life; the suffering that is greater because it replaces happiness, and seems to rest on the unshakable reality that, as the Buddha put it, ‘the world is in continuous flux and is impermanent’ and ‘human life is just like a mountain river, flowing far and swift, taking everything along with it; there is no moment, no instant, no second when it stops flowing, but it goes on flowing and continuing’. Here, duhkha acquires more meanings: it refers to the impermanent, uncontrollable and imperfect nature of the phenomenal world.
The suffering that is all-pervasive and everyday – part of a world of change and decay – was what the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker David Hume had in mind when he wrote:
Were a stranger to drop in a sudden into this world, I would show him as specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him and give him a notion of its pleasures – whither should I conduct him? To a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.4
For the Buddha, as much as for Hume, happiness was too closely bound together with suffering. Even the happiness caused by meditation was fleeting and so part of duhkha. Happiness could never be fully and permanently possessed as long as it arose from conditions external to us, conditions that changed all the time.
Part of the problem was that the so-called self that experienced the world was innately unstable, changing from moment to moment, and therefore insubstantial. ‘Me at this moment and me this afternoon are indeed two,’ wrote Montaigne, a close examiner of self.5 Man, the sixteenth-century French humanist said, was ‘a marvellous, vain, diverse and undulating object’, who ‘in all things and throughout is but patchwork and motley’. In the hands of this ch
angeable man, even reason revealed itself as ‘an instrument of lead and wax, extendable, pliable and accommodating to any bias or measure’.6
His vision of the self and the world as marked by diversity and perennial movement led Montaigne to declare that in his essays,
I do not portray being. I portray the passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.7
A similar view of changeable man prompted the Buddha on several occasions to provide close analytic descriptions of the series of events which, according to him, constitute the process of experience:
In dependence upon the eye and upon visible objects visual consciousness arises. The union of these three (the eye, objects and visual consciousness) constitutes contact. Dependent upon this contact feeling is constituted. One perceives what is thus felt; what one perceives one considers; and what one considers one develops all sorts of notions about.8
In the Buddha’s view, none of the stages in this process can be isolated from the others. Perception, feeling and consciousness form part of a dynamic complex, which individuals can call their self for the sake of convenience, but there is nothing stable or enduring about it. It was why duhkha, suffering, or impermanence and discontent, resides in the very nature of human existence.
This austere vision is not far from the one found among the greatest of modern novelists, Flaubert and Proust, who wrote about how human beings desiring happiness and stability were undermined slowly, over the course of their lives, by the inconstancy of their hearts and the intermittence of their emotions.
Personal experience and a habit of close analysis seem common to both the meditator and the artist in their discovery: they see that the human being is a process, a shifting web of relations among such changing aspects of his person as perceptions, desires and ideas, and that by presuming to possess a stable self he sinks deeper into ignorance and delusion.
For the Buddha, however, such discoveries were important only in so far as they led to the possibility of salvation. From his vision of the individual with the elusive self who is discontented and restless, who desires some kind of permanent happiness, security and stability and is constantly, pointlessly active, the Buddha drew a conclusion: that there is, as the second noble truth put it, a discernible cause of suffering.
He didn’t blame the individual for his suffering, using concepts like ‘sin’ and ‘evil’. It would have been easy, if banal, to do so. But it would have contradicted his own experience – reached through meditation – of the individual self as a process without essence. He knew about the thoughts and feelings, good or bad, which caused suffering by being uncontrollable and ever-changing. There had to be another cause, not personal, of suffering, and the Buddha found it in trishna, craving:
And this, O bhikshus, is the Truth of the Arising of Suffering. It is just thirst or craving (trishna) which gives rise to repeated existence, which is bound up with impassioned appetite, and which seeks fresh pleasure now here and now there, namely thirst for sensual pleasures, thirst for existence, thirst for non-existence.9
Trishna literally drives human beings. It was different from desire – the Buddha does not seem to have disapproved of wanting per se, or felt he was contradicting himself when he set off each morning to look for alms. To want something out of one’s free will, and with the right intention, was not craving. Craving came into being ‘wherever that is which seems lovable and gratifying, there it comes into being and settles’. It made individuals seek ‘fresh pleasure now here and now there’, in this life as well as the next. There was a craving to escape pain as well as a craving for wealth, power and status; a craving for sensual pleasures as well as for right opinions.
Each instance of craving involved an escape from the here and now, a desire for becoming or being something or someplace other than what the present moment offered. But to seek ceaselessly some new state of being while at the same time striving for permanence was to expose oneself to frustration:
The world, whose nature is to become other, is committed to becoming, has exposed itself to becoming; it relishes only becoming, yet what it relishes brings fear, and what it fears is pain.10
Rebirth, whether in another moment of experience, or in another life, was caused by precisely this craving for new forms of existence, by the desire to be something or somewhere.
As a grand principle purporting to explain all of human life, trishna doesn’t seem much unlike Hegel’s Spirit of History, Schopenhauer’s Will, or Nietzsche’s Will to Power: something we can’t actually observe or verify, something vaguely metaphysical. The closest western parallel to trishna is Schopenhauer’s will to live, the blind force that lies behind life on earth, which the German philosopher held responsible for all suffering in the world and which he thought was best denied, either through asceticism or through aesthetic contemplation.
But the Buddha insisted on tracing trishna, like his other discoveries, to actual human experience; it wasn’t for him, as the will was for Schopenhauer, the ‘Thing-in-itself’, something separate from the conditioned and phenomenal world. Meditation had revealed the human mind to him as a receptacle of random and short-lived impulses, one that made you change your posture, another that plunged you into a daydream, yet another that made you want to take a break.
As the Buddha saw them, these impulses, ceaselessly coming and going, and constituting what human beings think of as their experience, worked in a mechanical fashion. They were not the result of an active decision by the individual, which is why the individual can’t be the cause of his own suffering.
These unbidden impulses seemed to amount to a basic tendency within human life, one which replicates itself endlessly. The Buddha called this tendency ‘clinging’ (upadana), which flourishes because of man’s profound ignorance (avidya) of the nature of self and things as they actually are: impermanent, unsatisfactory, essence-less.
Clinging produces our typical and renewable desire for status, power, wealth and sexual love. But, as the Buddha never tired of repeating, to desire complete and secure happiness with an elusive self and in an impermanent world is to court frustration and discontentment. Even the fulfilment of all of one’s desires could bring only short-lived happiness. For as Oscar Wilde had put it, ‘In this world there are only two tragedies, one of not getting what one wants, and the other of getting it.’
The Buddha was categorical about the effects of uncontrolled trishna. ‘All aspects of experience,’ he declared, ‘in the mind and body, in which clinging inheres, are suffering.’11 This reduces the individual to a collection of impulses, doomed to repeat a pattern of craving, ignorance and clinging. But the Buddha was doing little if not creating through his seemingly bleak diagnosis the way to a cure.
As he saw it, impulses that arise in the mind, however automatic or habitual, also present the individual with choices. The individual can choose to act on them or not. Whatever decision he takes defines him for better or worse. Thus, for the Buddha, choice and intention shape the human being. They create his emotional and psychological world; and they add up to what the Brahmins called karma – the karma that for the Buddha resided in intention, expressed or not, as much as in action.
Previously, karma had been the act or deed the individual performed as part of a Brahmin-ordained social order, which then determined his social position in his next life. The Buddha rejected this definition, which enjoined the individual to see his salvation in serving the social order. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘choice or intention that I call karma – mental work – for having chosen, a man acts by body, speech and mind.’12
With these apparently innocuous words the Buddha introduced an idea in India no less radical than the one the thinkers of the European Renaissance came up with when they stated that the good was defined by human will and not by God or nature. ‘What good is man,’ Erasmus had asked, ‘if God acts on him as the potter acts on the clay?’13 He was inte
rvening in the centuries-old western debate between free will and determinism, the terms of which were set by Saint Paul when he declared that human beings were like inert clay in the hands of God. Erasmus and humanists like him wished to assert the dignity of human beings, their capacity to exercise their will and opt for goodness.
The Buddha reacted to a similarly reductive view of salvation – of grace through ritual, through socially prescribed deeds – when he defined karma as intention, and offered the possibility that individuals could break out of the over-determined universe of suffering.
Although their capacities are formed partly by the karma of their previous lives, human individuals are still able to exercise their free will within their present life. Karma was partly fate, but fate of which individuals could become, as it were, the authors. They can dispel the veil of ignorance, see things as they are, and control their desires. This is what the third noble truth asserted: that suffering can be overcome; that liberation is possible. It leads to the fourth noble truth, which prescribed the exact means – the eightfold path – by which greed, hatred and delusion could be overcome, and nonattachment, loving kindness and wisdom cultivated.
The first of these, Right View, means that action, speech and thought should flow out of an awareness of things as they really are, impermanent and unsatisfactory. Right Intention involves freeing oneself from selfishness and sensual pleasures, and acting with compassion and benevolence. Right Speech implies a rigorous distance from false, hurtful and idle chatter. Right Action proscribes violence, stealing and sexual misconduct. Right Livelihood means not working anywhere that forces one into violating the rules of Right Speech and Right Action. Right Effort involves a constant vigilance against unwholesome mental states (anger, greed, malice). Right Mindfulness is perpetual awareness of the body, feelings and thoughts. Right Concentration involves focusing the mind on a single object, and is the first stage of the meditation that leads to profound and lasting equanimity.
An End to Suffering Page 17