Category: Childhood

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.

Growing up as the Donna Reed Show

Okay, I admit it: I’m the kind of tedious baby boomer who reminisces about the 50s and that part of the 60s that came before the real 60s, or as my parents thought, the time just before everything went to hell. Women in those days did their housework in poplin dresses with which they wore stockings and utilitarian shoes, their hair done and their makeup on. My mother’s hands were always full, of laundry, sewing, the vacuum cleaner, or dishes. She always had a fragrance about her, which I called a “mummy smell”: something along the lines of Jergens hand lotion, light and sweet.

I played on the dining room floor under the table, with coloring books and dolls and picture books. I vaguely recall a playpen prior to that, and a crib for nap time. I seem to have memories of very early childhood, of being held in my mother’s arms at the kitchen table, where she would spoon baby food into my mouth and coo at me. I tried talking to her, but she didn’t understand me very well, which was mildly frustrating. In the evenings after the dinner dishes were done she would bathe me in the kitchen sink.

At some point before dinner my father would come home, calling out a cheerful hello as he came through the front door. I ran down the hall to him and he would pick me up and swing me in his arms. He wore a suit and tie, with a grey fedora and grey wool coat. His shoes were always shiny and his shirts neatly ironed. He told me he was “the boss of the bank,” which strictly speaking wasn’t true, although he was the treasurer, close enough. We lived in a two-story white house with black shutters,  a full front porch, a bay window, and an enormous yard with a barn in back for the blue-and-white car.

I have two older brothers, but they didn’t live with us; they were “at school.” Mark was seven years and Tommy four years older than I. Three or four times a year they would be home for visits that typically lasted two weeks, and we would be a family together. In between times we would drive up once a month or so to their school in Rhinebeck, New York. Both our visits and theirs were the high points of my young life. I loved my big brothers and saw them as living an exciting, grown-up life away, bringing welcome noise and laughter into our quiet home. We spent the entire visit playing together, going on excursions in the car, and hiking in the woods looking for snakes and turtles, which we would keep for a day or two and then set free again. Mark was very knowledgeable about the different varieties, garter snakes and grass snakes, box turtles and painted turtles. The fact that some of these creatures could be deadly was a source of fascination—over and over, he would ask our father, “Can I pick up a snapping turtle?” and Dad would answer, “Sure, just as soon as you figure out which of your fingers you don’t need any more.” “No!” Mark would say with a big laugh, and not long afterward would ask all over again.

Tommy was quieter, pacing around the dining room with his hands in loose fists to either side of his head. Once in awhile he would come out with some brief remark, and then return to his pacing. He played with blocks and simple white plastic bricks, or else drew rows and rows of tiny, square-shaped objects on sheets of paper, always in pencil. He would vocalize aimlessly in keening sounds, sometimes singing a little. Outside he liked the swing set in the back, where he would sing loudly as he pumped higher and higher.

Why couldn’t Mark and Tommy live with us all the time I once asked, and my mother simply groaned and shook her head. I didn’t get it. I could vaguely remember a time when Tommy was still with us, at a school across town. Earlier still they had gone to the same school I would attend. On my first day of kindergarten, the teacher called my name and then said, “I had your brothers,” through lips that were pursed just a little, and maybe by then I had some idea why. My brothers were “a handful,” especially Tommy, although according to my mother Mark had been an even bigger handful at one time. That was before he was sent to his first school away from home, a place called Strawberry Hill, where the teachers used a clever strategy to get him to stop screeching: every day my brother loved going along to meet the mail truck, but he could only go if he didn’t screech that day. For awhile he responded by screeching until he was hoarse, but eventually he learned to stop doing it.

These stories were nothing more to me than ordinary family lore, along with the fact that while the boys were home, none of my other friends came around. It was understood that the time with them and the time without them were separate, and I got used to never so much as talking about my brothers with people from our life apart from them, not with people my age or with grownups. I did not break this rule for many, many years.