Why Discovering the Buddha’s View on Suffering Is the Most Important Step to Overcoming It
The First Noble Truth
Understanding the different dimensions of what we call suffering or misery is key to knowing how to deal with it.
The First Noble Truth, one of the Buddha’s fundamental ancient teachings, gives us some insights, on how it arises and its different types. It’s eye-opening to say the least.
It starts with an understanding of ‘sense-pleasures’ followed by the three types of dukkha.
What comes up must come down, unless we’re detached
The Buddha explains that sense-pleasures (things or people that make us feel pleasure) have three phases:
- Attraction or enjoyment
- Evil consequence or danger or un-satisfactoriness
- Freedom or liberation
I go see a good friend. I get a high. I stop seeing that friend. I start getting a low because I miss her and can’t see her. I feel like something’s missing, unsatisfied if you will.
The Buddha says if we’re not attached to that person, we experience freedom or liberation since being detached means we no longer experience feelings of un-satisfactoriness. In a sense, we’re free from those feelings of high and low.
The Buddha says that life comes with pleasures and sorrows, ups and downs.
The dimensions of suffering
The First Noble Truth is dukkha, which translates into suffering, but it means more than that according to Walpola Rahula. It goes deeper to mean ‘impermanence’, ‘emptiness’, insubstantiality’.
Dukkha is broken down into three types:
- As ordinary suffering
- As produced by change
- As conditioned states
As ordinary suffering
Ordinary suffering is what we could call mental and physical suffering that anyone could recognize as such.
Things like birth, sickness, death, bad people, anxiety, stress, not getting what we want, and so on.
As produced by change
This comes from the understanding of what goes up must come down.
After a happy or pleasurable feeling, it eventually changes and disappears. This change is what produces the ‘suffering’, suffering as produced by change.
As conditioned states
This one is a bit trickier and can take a bit to wrap our heads around.
The Buddha says that impermanence is what causes suffering as laid out in the Five Aggregates.
The Five Aggregates are the combination of ever-changing physical and mental forces or energies divided into five groups. They’re form, sensation, perception, mental formation, and consciousness. They’re all aggregates because they work together to produce a mental being.
These aggregates are governed by the principle of impermanence, meaning that each of these aggregates is undergoing constant change, and this constant change is what produces suffering. The Buddha said,
Whatever is impermanent is dukkha.
The Buddha says that it’s the focus on ‘I’ or ‘self’ that produces the suffering. What we call ‘I’ or ‘self’ in the West is only the combination of the Five Aggregates in constant flux, constant change. There’s no sense of ‘me’ because things are constantly changing.
Key Message: When we learn to understand where our suffering comes from and how it arises, we’re prepared to take the next steps in ridding ourselves of it.
Selected Readings
Mind Full to Mindful by Om Swami
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula
