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Today we continue a series of talks on the Basics of Buddhism. I’m highly recommending the book, Naked Buddha, a Practical Guide to the Buddha’s Life and Teachings, by Adrienne Howley.
This man who lived 2600 years ago, named Siddhartha Gautama, left home in search of a way to relieve suffering, his own and all beings. He had been studying many different spiritual methods available at that time. There were several people trying two very different methods—indulging to excess in worldly pleasures until you were repulsed by them (many of us have already tried that method), or denying yourself any worldly pleasure, a practice called Asceticism, which encouraged eating barely any food and sleeping in the forest, to find spiritual enlightenment. Siddhartha had all the finest things when he was a prince growing up, and then decided to become an ascetic for 5-6 years. He almost died from the extreme deprivation. When he gave up asceticism, he realized that there must be a middle way. This is why Buddhism is often described as the middle path.
In its essence, he found out that if you are compassionately aware and perfectly honest with yourself, you can begin to relieve suffering. The first teaching by the Buddha after his enlightenment was the Four Noble Truths:
· Life is difficult.
· Life is difficult because we seek to satisfy ourselves in ways that are inherently unsatisfying.
· The possibility of liberation from difficulties exists for everyone.
· The way to free ourselves is to practice the Eightfold path that results in enlightened living.
The first Truth is that life is difficult. The word in Pali was dukkha. In his book, Insight Meditation, The Practice of Freedom, Joseph Goldstein translates dukkha in three ways, suffering, insecurity or being unsatisfied. The Buddha realized that most of us live with some sense that things or we are just not quite right. We might even get close, achieve a goal, feel successful, then we often go right back to feeling that there is something more to be done. It seems our culture encourages doing--doing can be confused as the thing that gives us value as a person.
There is also deep suffering in life--We get old, we get sick, we die. Those that we love get old, get sick, and die. This is the reality of living, and we often suffer because of it. The First Noble Truth is about facing this reality honestly.
Many times, it might seem like detaching from our thoughts and feelings would relieve the suffering. Many of us have tried to not get involved in order to avoid being hurt. Many of us have found that this method does not work very well either. We then suffer from a feeling of isolation and loneliness. The word non-attachment is often used in Buddhist texts, and it is sometimes misunderstood that the teachings are encouraging us to deny our thoughts, our emotions, deny anything that causes us suffering. However, the truth of the teachings is the exact opposite. We are encouraged to get to know our selves in a deeply honest and compassionate way, to get to know our thoughts, our emotions, our relationships, very very well. Non-attachment is to realize that these thoughts and emotions are NOT who we truly are, but FIRST we have to SEE them in order to transform our response to them. Compassionate awareness and honesty are the key ingredients to the Buddhist path. Adrienne Howley goes so far to say that, “Buddhism can be of no real value to an individual unless one learns to be perfectly honest with oneself.”
So, I encourage you, in this moment, to finish the sentence silently, “if I were perfectly honest with myself, …” What would you say? This level of questioning doesn’t stop at the first answer that might arise. Sometimes when we’re in pain, we feel angry, but when we probe deeper, there might be fear underneath the anger. This process of perfect honesty is a method to retrace the steps of our difficulties, to get to the root cause.
So, this first Noble Truth, “Life is difficult”, is a statement of honesty. We don’t shy away from it, we don’t pretend it’s not true, and we don’t just accept it as, The Second Noble Truth points out that we make life difficult because we seek to be happy in inherently unsatisfying ways. We keep trying to rearrange the external circumstances of our lives in order to be happy, and if we do manage to get everything and everyone doing what we consider to be the “right” thing (which in and of itself would be a miracle!), then before we know it, everything and everyone changes.
This second Noble Truth reveals itself in two ways: first, we seek happiness outside of ourselves, and second, if we do find some happiness, we wish for things never to change. Understanding impermanence is also a key factor in the Buddhist teachings. Everything is changing. Some things are changing faster or slower than others, but everything and everyone is changing. The underlying energy may remain, but the things created by that energy are constantly changing. The “you” that you were in high school is the not the “you” that you are right now (some might think, “Thank goodness!”). In fact, the “you” now is not the “you” that will be in ten minutes. Yet, we wish so badly for things to remain constant so we can get a handle on things. We all want to have some control over our lives to find happiness, and everything keeps changing, seemingly thwarting our efforts.
One of the inherently unsatisfying ways we deal with our world is that we put labels on everything, so we can feel like we know it, and it’s done. We label things like doorknobs and lightbulbs and other objects—some labels are helpful. But, we also label ourselves and other people. These labels can cause us to not see what is really happening in the here and now.
I want to tell this painful story about myself. I remember a couple of years ago driving down the road, my cellphone rings and I see my sister’s number appear on my phone. My thoughts and emotions immediately kicked into gear—“oh God, I just can’t deal with my sister today—she is the most negative person I know. Should I answer it? Should I let it go to voicemail? Then, I’ll have to call her back and then I dread it until I do”….and on and on…the dialogue went back and forth in my head. I decided to answer the phone. She had an idea about something to do with our mom’s house. I listened for about five minutes, and it felt like torture. I finally shouted back at my sister that I just couldn’t handle all her negativity. At that moment, my sister broke down and cried. Now, I really felt badly. She gained her composure and told me that in the last week, she had read the book called the Secret”, and that she had been working on being more positive all week. She had actually taken two hours preparing to call me because she knew I’d be more open to her idea if she presented in a positive way. In that moment, I realized that I had not really listened to a word that my sister said in the first five minutes of the phone call. I had labeled her negative long before I picked up the phone. I was on the lookout for any sign of a negative perspective, I even saw it when it probably wasn’t even there. That is how putting labels on people can bring us suffering. Experiment with seeing everyone first in a non-judging way. The person may not dramatically change, but our experience of the relationship with them will change dramatically.
Even worse, we often label ourselves in the same way—“I’m always like this, I’ll never change. I’ll never be able to….” There may be things that we cannot do, but I guarantee that every single one of us is changing at this very moment, and exciting new options are arising in each moment, and each of us has the power within us to decide which direction to go from here. We have an amazing number of choices in this culture, and most of the time, we don’t even consider anything but the ones we’ve chosen before.
So, life is difficult because we seek to satisfy ourselves in inherently dis-satisfying ways. The Third Noble Truth is what the Buddha discovered. There is a way out of our unskillful thoughts and behaviors. He discovered that there is peace hiding in each and every moment. And we can learn to tap into that peace, regardless of our external circumstances. These teachings are that powerful. Imagine what it would be like to come from a place of peace and have control over your responses in each situation as it arises?
Adrienne Howley states that the Buddhist path begins with learning mind control. Not that we will be able to stop unskillful thoughts or unhelpful emotions from arising, but we can learn how to create a gap between stimulus and response, so we have a choice, have the time to respond differently. We can learn how to place our power in compassionate awareness and honesty instead of wasting it on unhelpful conditioned behaviors and knee-jerk responses that create more suffering for ourselves and those around us.
To redirect the power within you, you’ll need to have the desire to choose differently, you’ll need to tap into the inspiration needed to keep going when the going gets tough. It might be a word, a phrase, a picture, a vision, whatever might work for you. I encourage you to give that some thought. As an example, we are encouraged to be mindful as if our hair is on fire, and visualize that compassionate awareness is the only thing that will put out the flames.
The Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path, eight ways of living that encourages this honesty and inspiration. And we’ll talk more about that on Tuesday evening.
As we leave this room and experience the world outside, we can use the tool of mindfulness, or compassionate awareness in each moment, to decipher what is actually happening, beyond the labels and old habits. One practice that you might try is to pick any common activity that you do throughout a week, like opening a door, or starting your car, or when the phone rings. Consider choosing one activity for this week, and each time it happens, practice being fully present and compassionate aware in that moment. That small step is an excellent start to embracing the Four Noble Truths!
Lastly, Roz Stoneking offered this answer to the question “What is the difference between Christian prayer and Buddhist prayer, since there is no “God” to pray “to”. Roz describes Buddhist prayer as "a commitment to join your energy to that divine energy within each of us which unites and sustains us as we work for the good of all beings.” Well said!
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