20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM. Kulananda
As I have described, the Buddha embarked on the quest for Enlightenment because he was deeply dissatisfied. He’d seen the inevitability of suffering old age, disease and death come to everyone, and he couldn’t just shut his eyes and lose himself in the shallow diversions we usually employ to avoid confronting the starker realities of life.
The Buddha saw that life was marked with one universal quality: it was never entirely satisfying. The Pali term for this quality of unsatisfactoriness is dukkha. Etymologically, it is linked to the idea of an ill-fitting cartwheel – something which doesn’t run smoothly, which is bumpy and uncomfortable. It describes the way things never come out quite right. Our lives contain pleasure and pain, gain and loss, happiness and sadness. But what they don’t contain is ultimate, final satisfaction. We never quite get all we’re looking for. This, the Buddha saw, is the fundamental human predicament.
In addressing himself to the problem of dukkha, the Buddha adopted a classical ancient Indian medical formula: a disease is diagnosed; its cause is identified; a cure is determined; a remedy is prescribed. Applying this analysis to the fundamental human predicament, the Buddha arrived at the Four Noble Truths.
The First Noble Truth identifies the problem. ‘There is dukkha’ – unsatisfactoriness.
Because we are never satisfied, we chase after experience. Constantly seeking satisfaction from the intrinsically unsatisfying, like hamsters in a wheel, we chase round and round, getting nowhere. Gain turns to loss, happiness gives way to sadness. We always seem to think that final, complete satisfaction is just around the corner. ‘If only I can do this or get that, then everything will be fine and I’ll be happy ever after.’ But in reality it’s never like that. The wheel just keeps on turning.
The Second Noble Truth asserts that the cause of dukkha is craving.
We are never satisfied because we have a fundamental disposition towards craving. No matter what we get, no matter how much or how good, we always want more, or we want something else, or we want it to stop.
Between them, craving and its counterpart, aversion, set the shape and boundaries of our personality – ‘I am the person who drives such and such a car; shops in such and such a place; lives in such and such a neighbourhood; wears such and such clothes …’ Thus we create our fragile identities. But the structure is unstable. Things always change. Life flows on and we find ourselves caught up in a remorseless process of continually having to reconstruct ourselves – ‘I like this, I want that; I don’t like this, I don’t want that’ over and over, unendingly. Such is the un-Enlightened human predicament – endless unsatisfactoriness, driven by craving.
The Third Noble Truth asserts that with the cessation of craving unsatisfactoriness also ceases.
This is what the Buddha saw on the night of his Enlightenment. Having seen so clearly that the whole of existence, the endless round of birth and death, is driven by insatiable craving, he could no longer live as if craving would ever produce the final satisfaction with which it constantly enticed. The bonds of craving dropped away, and with it all that had limited and constricted him – he was free.
The Fourth Noble Truth asserts that there is a path which leads to the cessation of craving: the Noble Eightfold Path.
THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
Translators usually render the Pali word samma, which is prefixed to all of the eight limbs or aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path, as ‘right’, but this can give the wrong impression, as if there were a simple ‘right’ way of doing things as opposed to the ‘wrong’ way, and that one could easily get the path ‘right’ and have done with it. But the Buddhist path isn’t quite so simply divided into ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It is more developmental than that, for it is a path of practice, where there is always room for improvement. Rather than ‘right’ we can use the word ‘perfect’.
The Noble Eightfold Path therefore consists of Perfect Vision, Perfect Emotion, Perfect Speech, Perfect Action, Perfect Livelihood, Perfect Effort, Perfect Awareness and Perfect Samadhi.1
The Path isn’t traversed in simple consecutive steps. We don’t start with vision, move on to emotion, then speech, action, livelihood etc. Rather, one works in different ways on different aspects all the time. But there are various ways in which the different aspects of this path can be grouped. One of the most basic is to divide it into the Path of Vision and the Path of Transformation.
The Path of Vision consists only of the stage of Perfect Vision. It begins when we catch a first glimpse of an entirely different way of being. The Path of Transformation comprises the other seven aspects of the Path and is the means by which we completely reorient every facet of our being in such a way that it begins to accord with that initial vision.
THE PATH OF VISION
Perfect Vision
The first glimmerings of Perfect Vision may arise spontaneously. Perhaps in a moment of inspiration we catch a glimpse of the vast interconnectedness of all living things, or at a time of bereavement we see the futility of all our ‘getting and spending’. Some catch their first glimpse of it through encountering another person and seeing a particular quality in the way they live their lives.
To the extent that they have any value at all, the great artistic, philosophical and religious productions of mankind embody some degree of Perfect Vision – to some extent at least, they all communicate something of how things really are.
Over the course of its 2,500-year history Buddhism has generated a vast treasury of teachings – doctrines concerning the ultimate nature of reality and different methods for its realization. Fortunately, we don’t have to master them all. All we need is what will help us to see more clearly how things really are and to act accordingly. One such teaching is that of the Three Marks of Conditioned Existence.
The Three Marks of Conditioned Existence
In his teaching, the Buddha distinguished between two different states – samsara and nirvana. Samsara pertains to the endless round of birth and death in which we find ourselves perpetually wandering. It is the state of un-Enlightened being. Nirvana, on the other hand, is that state of complete freedom and unending spontaneous creativity which follows from the complete eradication of craving.
The nature of samsara is that it is conditioned. How we are, what we think, what we feel, all arise in dependence upon conditions: our parents, schools, nation and race – all these have conditioned us in particular ways, and we continue to be conditioned by the news we read, the state of the weather, the food we eat and the company we keep. We have a reactive, coin-in-the slot kind of mentality. In goes an input, out comes an output. In goes sunshine, out comes happiness; in goes rain, out comes unhappiness.
Nirvana, on the other hand, which is synonymous with Enlightenment, is a state of complete, experiential insight into the conditioned nature of all phenomena. Seeing the conditioned nature of things, the Enlightened mind is not enslaved by them. The Enlightened mind is therefore completely creative – able to move in any direction at will, whatever it does will be free, fresh and spontaneous.
Conditioned existence has three marks or characteristics. It is unsatisfactory, impermanent, and insubstantial.
That conditioned existence is unsatisfactory was explained above under the heading of the First Noble Truth – the Truth of dukkha, unsatisfactoriness.
One of the main reasons why conditioned existence is unsatisfactory is because it is intrinsically impermanent. Nothing ever lasts. Whatever we want, whatever we get, slips in the end from our grasp. Everything, always, changes. How simple it is to say this, yet how difficult to truly realize it. We constantly treat conditioned phenomena as if they were permanent – our friends and family will always be around, our car will never break down, our favourite sweater will