Category: Buddhism

The Three Characteristics: Suffering

Dukkha, “suffering” (also translated as “unsatisfactoriness”), is central to the Buddha’s teaching; in fact, he reputedly said, “I teach only suffering, and the end of suffering.” We’ve already encountered the role of suffering in the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha also appears as one of the three marks or characteristics of existence, permeating our lives and our surroundings through and through. There are things that please us, beguile us, hook us in; but none of these things satisfies.

When we’re young, we are full of plans for what we want to do with our lives. For most of us, these plans might include things like a career, marriage, children, a nice place to live, money to spend on necessities and a few luxuries, travel, hobbies, good food, nice clothes, and friends. Young people are encouraged by their families and teachers to look to the future and to consider their immediate difficulties to be transitory. I recall a conversation with my mother and one of her friends, during a time in my life when I didn’t fit in. “Some day,” they told me, “none of this will matter.” They were wrong: as I became an adult, the identity I formed in adolescence proved to be remarkably tenacious.

Enter the Buddha and his teachings regarding dukkha. One of my dharma teachers, Kenneth Folk, has said that “the Buddha is not your friend.” Warm, rosy predictions of a brilliant life in samsara, the turning wheel of birth and death, are entirely unfounded. Some adults in our own culture might agree with him once we hit our midlife crisis, when we realize that our fond hopes in youth have not materialized; or maybe they have, but without bringing the happiness we had expected. People may be tempted to jump ship, make a career change or look for a new partner, or buy a new house or car they can’t really afford. It might work out in the short run, but letdown is inevitable.

From time to time I imagine my life as if it had been different in some significant way. Maybe I never had the stage fright, and would be able to perform in music ensembles without stress. Maybe I had the kind of systematic focus that would allow me to work an eight-hour day, go home and relax, engage in an enjoyable hobby, and then go to sleep without difficulty. Maybe I wasn’t plagued by the grandiose illusion that I needed a big, fat career, and so would never be constantly comparing myself to others, or feeling like a failure just doing a good job day in and day out. In other words, I imagine a life without dukkha.

This Other Laurel is still a meditator, I’ve decided. She gets up early, makes herself a cup of tea, maybe takes a brisk walk around the block, and then settles down for some cushion time. After work she heads to the meditation center for a half hour sit with a group before heading home. She also volunteers in her community (because of course, she has the energy for it). She lives simply but comfortably; she is not tempted to spend more than she earns. Is she married? Sometimes I imagine her as single, but it seems like a lonely life to me, so I give her my husband, except he’s the Other Husband, also free of dukkha.

I have found a place for this paragon to live, and have even imagined her car and her wardrobe. The entire fantasy seems to be an equivalent of the dreams I had as a young person, except instead of dreaming of my imaginary future, I dream of an imaginary past. But although I can see the outer trappings of this person’s life, I am unable to make sense of what lies within. I can only try to imagine the absence of things like stress, depression, boredom, regret, negative judgments, and anxiety, all the while knowing that it is impossible.

Traveling allows us to see other places, and imagine what life might be like for us if we lived there. We read novels or watch movies and television shows in order to put ourselves in the place of the protagonist. Maybe we fall in love with one of the characters—the protagonist’s love interest, most likely—or imagine ourselves working in that person’s occupation. Such experiences help us to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a human in the world, to place ourselves in another person’s skin or context, which is an essential component of a moral education. Still, they can never be more than the product of our imaginings.

I have recently longed to move somewhere else, either to the city that is an hour’s drive from here or to a warmer climate, or maybe even out of the country altogether. These longings are accompanied by imaginings of Other Laurels living in Other Places with the Other Husband. Yet several years ago I looked out the kitchen window at the trees in my neighbor’s yard, and just realized, “This is it!” I laughed. It was so simple that I might not even have noticed. This is it, just this. This is all that is it. No other, no else. Just this.

The Big Wow

I think it was in a post by Brad Warner that I first heard about The Big Wow, or perhaps it was just on one of the Internet forums I frequent. The Big Wow is the overwhelming, transforming, hit-by-a-bolt-of-lightning mystical experience that changes you forever after. Everyone wants one of those, and once you get it, you spend a good part of the rest of your life wanting another, and another, and another. Yet it’s not the Big Wow that actually transforms you; it’s the plodding, day-to-day grind of sitting in meditation, doing walking meditation, practicing mindfulness during the day, questioning yourself, and getting your act together on a number of fronts (which is what the Noble Eightfold Path is all about). You may be able to draw on the memory of that experience to motivate yourself to keep plugging away, but in the long run it’s a mistake to make too much of it.

My Big Wow happened when I was 19. It was March of 1973, and I was returning to college from spring break. For some reason, my violin teacher had loaned me her car for the week, a reflection of how close we were during that period. I was traveling east on the Massachusetts turnpike, going a little over 70. There was a school bus in front of me, and we were approaching a slight hill. I got in the left lane to pass the bus, accelerated to about 80, and then without warning the school bus pulled in front of me (I can still see it in my mind’s eye). Being a young, inexperienced driver, I did the opposite of what I should have done: I slammed on the brakes, putting the car into a tailspin. I overcorrected with the steering, tried the brakes again, and then began to panic as I lost all control of the car.

What happened next is hard to describe. I remember skidding back and forth over the highway with a few other cars in view, and I remember a look of concern on someone’s face through a window of one of those cars. I recognized with a sickening horror that I might not be able to get out of it alive, when suddenly I surrendered and everything stopped. I felt myself gently pulled upward, out of my body, and I felt the various parts of my identity fall away as if I were dropping layers of clothing. I had a thought: so now this one is over, the one called Laurel, tall, blonde, a violinist—and so it ends, and now I’m returning. And then I was flooded by an indescribable love, and thought briefly with regret about my parents, how they would grieve. But consolation was immediate: soon they will know, in no time at all. And there was relaxation into that love which was my true home.

The next thing I recall was returning to myself in a daze, with the car on the left shoulder, facing in the opposite direction of the road. I had no idea how I got there. I eventually made my way to the right shoulder, where I was approached by a kind man who had stopped to help me. I slowly followed him and his family  to the nearest rest stop, and had a cup of chicken soup and some tea. “See,” he told his young daughter, “Laurel went through all that and now she’s sitting right here.” We parted and I drove the rest of the way into Boston.

It would have been lovely if, in the aftermath of that experience, I could have integrated its insights and lived my life forever free from the fear of death. Instead, I was left with another phobia about driving on highways, which has stayed with me to this day. It would also have been lovely if I had gained the kind of perspective that would have led to better mental health, or at least more maturity. No such luck. I did spend time and energy puzzling over it, in an attempt to put it in some kind of framework that would make it intelligible. At the time I was under the influence of my Christian Scientist music teacher, who urged me to put it out of my mind and not speak of it. Traffic accidents fall in the same category as illness, something that involves the unreal material world, which according to that doctrine we must transcend.

Later, when I became serious about Christianity, I viewed my experience as an encounter with the pure love of God. I read mystic writers with a sense of having something of my own to bring to the table, feeling a little smug about it, to be honest. I had fallen into the trap of seeing myself as special, an inevitable pitfall of the spiritual life. Later still, as a Buddhist, I saw it as one of the stages on the Path of Insight. In some respects it fits the profile of both traditions. I have come to prefer calling it The Big Wow, however, because that term is just irreverent enough to keep it in perspective. Such things can happen, and then other stuff happens, and it’s best not to wallow in it. The most such an experience can do is inspire you to keep practicing when you might otherwise skip it. It is ancillary, not central. That is all.

 

The Three Characteristics: Impermanence

The Buddha taught that all of our experiences have three basic characteristics, the first of which is anicca, or impermanence, the second dukkha, suffering, and the third anatta, not-self (also translated as no-self). We are most familiar with impermanence from the changes that occur over the days and years, with children being born, growing up, and leaving home, or our bodies showing signs of aging. We may resist these changes, grieving the loss of our children or of our youthful appearance, or we may welcome them, but either way, nothing stays the same forever. Moving to another house, town, or country; changing jobs or careers; losing loved ones to accidents, illness, or old age—all present challenges to our sense of security and self.

My father worked for a single bank in our hometown for two decades before retirement, then left it all behind and moved with my mother to the other end of the state. Soon after his retirement, the bank was consolidated with several others in the region, and most of my father’s contribution became a thing of the past. The new president was the manager of the conglomerate, with the bank my father had managed only a relatively minor part of the new entity. As he and my mother began a new life elsewhere, the network of friends and neighbors they left behind thinned out. In his prime, my father had been a major figure in that community. In no time at all, he was barely remembered. I watched this happening during my own prime working years, when I was leaving my mark on the world, or so I thought. It was a soboring lesson in impermanence.

There is another, more refined level of impermanence which most of us never see, that being the instant-by-instant rhythm of life itself. We order our lives temporally as past-present-future, remembering the first, experiencing the second, and imagining the third. In truth, however, each of these is a construction of our minds, and the present, in which we believe we live, is gone as soon as it arrives. In a famous commentary on the Buddhist scriptures, the 5th-century teacher Buddhaghosa describes a series of stages meditators will traverse as they practice insight meditation. The fourth of these, Insight into the Arising and Passing Away, is the point at which we will have direct experience of the instantaneous arising and passing of sensations from our minds. The experience itself can be rapturous, with the rapidly passing sensations overloading our senses’ ability to recognize them. Soon after the meditator enters into a new series of stages that are known as the dukkha nyanas, which some call the Dark Night. Their very names are indicative of what they are like: Dissolution, Terror, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance, and worst of all, Reobservation, in which the meditator goes back over the series again and again until they have absorbed all of its lessons.

Insight meditation, also referred to as mindfulness,  is the means by which we learn to observe our minds and bodies more and more closely, until the Three Characteristics become clear to us in all of our sensations. There are numerous techniques for doing this, not to mention differences of opinion about the appropriate level of preparation for insight practices. Some teachers endorse a gradual approach, with significant work to quiet the mind prior to undertaking insight, while others recommend beginning insight work much sooner and pressing onwards. In addition, not all Buddhists recognize the Progress of Insight map as represented in the commentary, or even if they do, there are some teachers who believe it is not helpful to share information about the different stages with students. There are several reasons for taking this stance, chief among them the concern that our impressionable minds could easily lead us to imagine ourselves at one or another of the stages when we are in fact nowhere near.

Observing the mind at close range is inseparable from observing the body. Many westerners have only a vague idea of what is present in the body because we spend so much of our lives in our heads, preoccupied with our thoughts. In practicing mindfulness of the body, meditators learn to recognize and describe the physical manifestations of our emotions, especially those we tend to ignore or repress in day-to-day life. As a result, insight practices can be hard on the meditator because they bring painful emotions to the surface. I can remember one retreat where my mind-chatter was much worse than usual. I had taken on a practice of choiceless awareness, which involves letting thoughts and sensations pass in and out of awareness without interference, but in the process I was flooded by so many thoughts that I might as well have been daydreaming. I finally turned to a more structured approach called noting, which entails attaching a brief label to sensations as they are recognized. I was immediately plunged into the most excruciating feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and grief, so intense that I could hardly figure out how to work with them. I recognized that my mind had been using the chatter to prevent these feelings from arising, but then my noting technique had dislodged the thoughts. The work of this particular retreat was to allow these emotions to arise and then pass, as all things eventually do, by virtue of their impermanence.

 

The Four Noble Truths

There is a word in the Buddha’s language (Pali, a cousin of Sanskrit) that is usually translated as “suffering.” That word is dukkha. In order to understand its meaning better, we might consider its opposite and counterpart, sukkha. Sukka sounds something like the word “sugar,” to which it is related. We can imagine an experience of sweetness, of bliss, of pleasantness, and then turn to the opposite of these things to recognize dukkha as bitterness, bad feelings, or unpleasantness. The first of the Four Noble Truths asserts that there is a component of dukkha in all human experience. This is as true for the healthy, beautiful, privileged, rich, and famous as it is for those whose lives are full of obvious misery.

Imagine your most delectable experience, maybe sex with the partner of your dreams, or eating a slice of chocolate cake, or feeling a pleasant breeze on a summer day at the beach. No matter how delightful, these experiences don’t last forever, and when they are over, we are on to something else. “Yes,” you may say, “but it was wonderful while it lasted.” It was indeed. Yet if you look closely at each pleasurable experience, you may find that it wasn’t entirely wonderful. Perhaps a touch of performance anxiety accompanied the sex, or maybe there was a sense of frustration that the chocolate cake was gone so soon, or there was an annoying sound of nearby construction marring the beach scene. Maybe after the fact the partner showed too much attention to someone else, prompting jealousy, or the chocolate cake ended up causing a stab of concern about gaining weight, or the return to office work after the trip to the beach was all the more frustrating in comparison with what you were leaving behind.

I am not trying to accentuate the negative here so much as to unpack what the Buddha asserted as a simple fact: that suffering is universal. All of us are subject to sickness, old age, and death, and all of us, most of the time, want things to be other than they are. One thing we do in response is to try to pack our lives with as many pleasant, rewarding experiences as possible. When our efforts are unsuccessful, we tune out the things we don’t like and distract ourselves, finding ways of not being completely present. If we undergo too much trauma we may find ourselves unable to feel much at all, good or bad, or we may find ourselves acting out in a variety of ways.

The Buddha further taught that the root of universal dukkha is tanha, translated as “craving.” This is the Second Noble Truth. We crave not only this or that self-gratifying thing, but existence itself (we can even crave non-existence at times). Craving is part of a sequence called Dependent Origination, a highly complex process through which we become who and what we perceive ourselves to be. This is a convoluted sentence for the sake of expressing a difficult concept, that we are the orchestrators of our own identities. The most debilitating suffering, underlying any other, is the effort we make to hold ourselves together, because in truth there is nothing to hold onto. Craving and its next stage, clinging, mark our overwhelming need to be someone and something, literally to make something of ourselves.

The fruit of these efforts shows up in suffering. Returning to our examples, at the same time we are enjoying a sexual experience with someone, we also are creating a self that is sexy and desirable. When we are rejected or when we fail to perform, that image is shattered, and we suffer humiliation. Even if we are mature enough to handle such setbacks with ease, there is disappointment and a need to move on to better things. When we bite into a delicious piece of cake, we have an underlying personal narrative about food that accompanies the pleasure; for example, “What am I doing? What about my resolve to avoid sugar and eat healthy? Why do I do these things? What the hell is wrong with me anyway?!” Or maybe it’s more like, “That’s okay, I can do this if I want to, I am not a child, I don’t have to worry.” The self-talk serves the need to make sense of the experience within the context of our picture of who we are. Finally, as we enjoy the ocean breezes, we may be thinking, “I just love the ocean! I wish I lived here. Maybe when I retire I can come move to this town,” or else, “This is nice. I want to make a family tradition of coming here every year.” Then we become The Person Who Loves the Ocean.

The Buddha doesn’t leave us hanging on the edge of a cliff with our suffering, but rather gives us the Third Noble Truth, which is nirodha, cessation, the end of suffering. When we understand what is happening we are able to let go of craving, clinging, and everything that goes with it, especially the delusion of the separate, unconditioned self. We drop our defenses, stop propping up our image, and allow things to be as they are. Developing the insight to do this is difficult, but it is also possible. The Fourth Noble Truth is the means of doing this, the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. It’s a tall order, but it’s also the key to liberation from suffering.

The Three Poisons: Delusion

Delusion is not as easy to characterize as greed or aversion. It manifests in less obvious ways, often hiding behind a mask of complacency. In the early 16th century, the humanist writer Erasmus wrote a book entitled Praise of Folly, illustrating the endless ways humans deceive themselves, usually with ruinous results. It is an encyclopedia of delusion, which could just as easily be called folly.

Folly in Erasmus’ book is the universal accompaniment to every human enterprise. People embark on careers, marriages, friendships, parenthood, and even recreation without the slightest idea how any of it will turn out, yet they think they know what they are doing. It is this act of self-serving prognostication that is the essence of folly. There is a saying that “Life goes on while we are making other plans.” Folly is those other plans. Folly, or delusion, is the motivation behind our tendency to live so much in an ideal future where we will have everything we want, causing us to devalue the present; or to fear disaster and waste our lives chasing a false sense of security. Delusion is also behind the tendency to devalue ourselves by believing we are other than what we are. We believe we are intelligent, beautiful, and accomplished, or else we think we are stupid, ugly, and good for nothing. Either appraisal is a devaluation and delusion, because it places a label on what can never be defined.

Just as desire and aversion are two sides of the same coin, delusion is the coin’s rim. We believe that if we could just have what we want, or get rid of what we don’t want, all will be well. If we could find the right person and marry him, we would live happily ever after; if that annoying coworker would just go away, we would finally experience lasting job satisfaction. Delusion is related to ignorance, with the refinement that it is willful ignorance. You can picture the delusional personality type with her fingers in her ears, forever chanting “lalala I can’t hear you!”

My best example of a delusional type is Ronald Reagan with his clarion call, “it’s morning in America!” (his admirers would doubtless suggest a different political figure). People who want to believe a leader in spite of the fact that his policies will not promote peace, prosperity, or goodwill are suffering from delusion. Likewise, people who try to use fact-based arguments in a setting fraught with emotion are deluded. Delusion permeates American political culture, more so even than the greed of consumerism or the hatred of racism (although in the current state of polarization between liberals and conservatives, hatred may overtake it). Erasmus’ Praise of Folly shows no respect to rulers of his time, castigating them as warmongering and hedonistic, with little to no interest in benefiting their subjects. If he were able to see 21st-century America, he would say that nothing has changed in five hundred years.

Humans are poor resources of wisdom or self-control, yet even so, all the poisons have some positive benefits for humanity. Desire can spur us to pursue wholesome actions, while aversion can motivate us to correct injustice (or even to do something as necessary as avoid spoiled meat). And without delusion, Folly tells us, no one would have the courage to undertake anything worthwhile. The path to enlightenment begins where we are, with a desire for a better life, an aversion to suffering, and a deluded notion of where that path will take us. It may seem like a poor foundation, but it’s all we have.

The Three Poisons: Greed

According to Buddhist teaching, there are three poisons that affect the mind, creating a distorted lens through which we view reality. These are greed (desire), hatred (aversion), and delusion (wrong view). These roughly correspond to the three types of sensations we encounter: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Finally, there are three basic personality types that lean towards one of the three poisons more than the other two, although all of us are affected by all three. I am going to begin with the greed type.

People of this type look at a room full of objects, or a catalogue or department store, and immediately focus on wanting what they see. My mother was a greed type. She was a marathon shopper, bringing home sacks of things almost every day. A typical exchange between us would go like this: “That’s a lovely shade of lipstick you’re wearing, Jane. What is it?” “It’s a Revlon, called [insert name here].” “Oh, really? I’d like to get that shade. Can I try it? Maybe it will look good on me.” And within a day or two she would add it to her collection.

Whenever she travelled with my dad the two of them would acquire Persian rugs, bone china, and artworks to bring home. At the point of my father’s retirement, they had a sizable house filled with beautiful things. The task of downsizing was excruciating, which is why they did only the bare minimum to fit into their retirement home, itself not exactly small. After my father’s death, my mother stayed in that house for four years before moving to my town in the Midwest. Getting her out of there was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, because she wanted to spend hours considering each item, reminiscing about it, lovingly planning either to donate or keep it. I and her realtor ended up calling in a group of men with a truck and hauling off all the stuff she would not be taking with her. She was furious, but if we hadn’t done it she would never have made it out of there at all.

Greed types are hungry for experiences, things, life itself. Greed isn’t necessarily all bad, for without it none of us would be motivated to do the things necessary to keep us alive. We also wouldn’t be able to appreciate the good things the world has to offer. As with the other two poisons, however, greed is rooted in the illusion that we can find true freedom and happiness from what is outside ourselves, and the energy we devote to getting the things we crave can occupy our entire lives, setting us up for frustration and even abuse (think about animal hoarding). The thrill of anticipation is never quite realized in having what we want, and so we soon get bored and want something more.

I think about greed as the feeling I get when I see something that causes me to light up like a Christmas tree. In my case, it’s cake. There’s a scene in the 2013 version of the Great Gatsby that I noticed more than any of the others, in which Jay Gatsby prepares to meet his lady love at Nick’s cottage. He fills the place with flowers accompanied by an extravagant array of cakes, and for the entire scene, the cakes were all that I noticed. A picture of a beautiful cake is often enough to send me to the store to get some for myself.

Greed or desire is a lens through which a person experiences the world. Everything is evaluated as being potentially available to a greed type, who has a bottomless bucket list. While it may seem unflattering to describe someone in this way, we’re only presenting facts to be understood, not moral judgments or criticisms. Insight is the necessary step to letting go, which in turn leads to freedom.