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Dear Still Water Friends,
This Thursday evening, after our meditation period, we will place our
mindfulness practice into a larger context by exploring together
suffering and the end of suffering. This was the theme of the
Buddha's first Dharma talk in which he introduced the Four Noble
Truths, and continued to be a theme he returned to again and again in
his teachings.
The First Noble Truth is the recognition that we do suffer. For the
Buddha, suffering includes the normal pains and miseries of everyday
life: injury, sickness, death, loss, not getting what we want,
having to put up with what we don't want.
Suffering also included the pain associated with impermanence. Things
inevitably change: we get older, failure follows success, ripe fruits
begin to rot. If we try to hold on to what is, we suffer.
And finally, for the Buddha, a very subtle but persistent suffering
came from our tendency to see ourselves as a thing (a person, an ego, a
self), rather than as a flowing river of experience. Our attempts to
find meaning and security in "selves" inevitable leads to suffering.
Certainly, in the short run, some "selves" are better than others (for
example, seeing oneself as competent and loving, rather than
ineffective and cruel), however, in the long run, all the "selves" we
can create cause suffering, because they do not fully reflect the
underly reality of "non-self." (I am particularly aware these days of
the subtle ways in my life I have let the actions of others define me.
Because of what someone else said or did, I defined myself as
humiliated, abandoned, unwanted, inferior, etc., and suffered
accordingly.)
So the First Noble Truth is about fully recognizes and understanding
our suffering. The Second Noble truths is about the habitual responses,
the habit energies, which are continually creating suffering in our
lives. And the Third Noble Truth is about stopping what we are doing to
create suffering, so that we suffer less.
In the Buddha's words, the primary cause of suffering is craving, in Pali, tanha.
As we talked about several weeks ago, Tanha is the unreflected response
which automatically moves us toward pleasure and away from pain,
without regard to longer term consequences or the effects on others. As
Tanha is replaced by Chanda, reflective, aware intention, then
suffering is reduced.
Thich Nhat Hanh, when he writes about the noble truths, emphasizes ignorance rather than craving. In Old Path White Clouds he has the Buddha explaining the arising and cessation of suffering in this way: