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Four Noble Truths: Nirodha (5 of 5) Three Forms of Cessation

So this week, we've been talking about the Third Noble Truth, the truth of the cessation of suffering. The most common way in which this formulation—of what is usually called the Four Noble Truths—appears in the suttas^[1] is without the title "Four Noble." It says, for example, someone understands, or one should understand: suffering, the arising of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the practice leading to the cessation of suffering.

Then, because in the so-called first sermon of the Buddha he goes into some detail, he calls it the Four Noble Truths: the Noble Truth of suffering, the Noble Truth of the arising of suffering, the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering, and the Noble Truth of the practice leading to the cessation of suffering. Because that's considered the first sermon, it's often given a lot of emphasis. There are explanations there about what each of these are, and those explanations are treated as being definitive, like this is the true definition of the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths are held up as being the central teachings of the Buddha.

Paradoxically, or oddly enough, the Buddha very rarely actually explained the Four Noble Truths in the suttas. For some reason, either he didn't talk about it much, or it wasn't preserved. There are only five places where he explicitly explains what these are. People who do text-critical work say most of these appear to be later interpretations, the product of later editors. So it seems like the Buddha didn't teach much actually about the Four Noble Truths. It's kind of shocking to hear—so much so that some scholars say that he actually didn't teach the Four Noble Truths.

But what he did teach over and over again is that there is suffering, there's the arising, the cessation, and the practice leading to the cessation. In the so-called first sermon of the Buddha, that is taken, understood, or interpreted to be one of the most common ways of understanding the Four Noble Truths.

The First Form of Cessation: Craving

I think it's fair to say it's the idea that suffering has a cause, and that cause is craving, and with the cessation of craving is the cessation of suffering. It's a powerful teaching. It's a powerful interpretation. In all kinds of areas in our everyday life, it's just useful to consider, "What's the cause or what's my contribution to the suffering I'm having?"

If I look deeply within to see my contribution, there's something probably that is a compulsion, a drivenness, a thirst for something, something we can't really stop, a drive that we can't stop. That's represented by this word craving. It can be very useful to look at that and see where we're compulsive, see where we are addicted, where we're attached, and then to experience letting go of it, or having it come to an end, and feeling how wonderful that is. That's great. In all kinds of areas in everyday life, in situations, this is a useful analysis.

The Second Form of Cessation: Conditions

As people meditate, the Four Noble Truths are interpreted different ways as the mind gets quieter. One of the interpretations of the Second Noble Truth is that it has to do with the conditions that come together to cause suffering. There are lots of conditions that cause suffering. Some people who emphasize conditionality don't necessarily give pride of place to craving. Sometimes people give pride of place to ignorance. Ignorance is the primal condition for craving, for suffering itself.

As we meditate, we are relaxing the conditioning faculties of the mind, the ways in which the mind is thinking, conceiving, and constructing our world. Meditation is a process of stilling and quieting that. We can quiet it to a great degree. We're not really thinking about the external world anymore; we're not really thinking much of anything. Just a lot of peace and settledness.

A lot of suffering can disappear when all the constructive, conceiving aspects of the mind—the memory aspects of the mind—have quieted down. It's kind of like taking a shower and becoming clean. It feels so good to go back into the world when you're clean. When meditation has been that inner shower, then we come back into the world cleaner, fresher, with fresher eyes, not carrying the burden of our preoccupations. Often that's when we see much more opening in life, and see much more freedom in life.

We've relaxed the conditions—not necessarily the cause of our suffering, but sometimes the cause turns out to be only one factor that contributes to suffering, the so-called central cause. Just relaxing deeply doesn't give that cause enough strength to really be troublesome for us.

So that's a second interpretation. Here, the cessation of suffering has to do with the cessation of these conditions. As I'm saying, the deeper the meditation goes, the deeper the stilling of these conditions is. It's quite wonderful. As the conditions get stiller and stiller, quieter and quieter, that conceiving mind, the constructing mind that's interpreting things, telling stories, and labeling things, kind of quiets down. We start living in the flow of direct sensations, direct experience: the comings and goings of sounds, taste, smells, touch, body sensations, thoughts, and all that.

The Third Form of Cessation: Inconstancy

This coming and going of stuff is quite phenomenal. I want to tell a little story from the suttas, in my interpretation of the context for the story. (It's not there in the suttas.)

A bunch of monks were sitting around the campfire, just telling one yarn after another about the great mythological miracles associated with the Buddha's life. They're outdoing each other with stories about, you know, when the Buddha was born, he came out and immediately walked seven steps. He was conceived immaculately. The gods received him and held him up so he wouldn't have touched the ground. The cosmological, mythological stories are just quite phantasmagoric, fantastic.

So they're going around and they're talking about this. Ānanda^[2], the Buddha's disciple, is reciting all these wonderful miracles, saying, "This is a wonderful miracle. This is miraculous." Then, at the end of all these miracle stories, what the Buddha says is kind of like the climax of the story or the punchline. All the earlier part is a setup for what the Buddha is going to say.

The Buddha says, "I'll tell you what is a miracle. When I have a thought, I see the arising of the thought, the persistence of the thought, and the ceasing of the thought. When I have a feeling, I see the arising of the feeling, the persistence of the feeling, and the passing away of the feeling. When there are perceptions, I see the arising of the perception, the persistence of it, and the disappearance of it. That is a miracle."

So, all these miracles about the Buddha's miraculous, so-called powers—that's not really that important. What's really important is the ability to really see or be present for the flow and the change of how things come and go, arise and pass, and all that. Seeing that is to really see, "This is where freedom is found." To let the flow unfold, the coming and going unfold, and release the holding on it, the pushing, the resistance to it. To open up to the space at the end of the ceasing. Before there's an arising, where there's nothing to hold onto, nothing to cling to. In a sense, to kind of fall into that space and experience the freedom of the heart and the mind. The radical letting go.

Here, this third interpretation of the cessation of suffering has to do with that. It's seeing two things: the arising and ceasing, the inconstant nature of things, to be in that flow. And to see that there's where freedom is found. That there's profound liberation to be found in being in that flow and not stopping it, not resisting it, and just allowing it to move through us, without any movement of clinging, holding, contracting, or craving itself. The deepest liberation that the Buddha over and over emphasized comes from this deep meditative experience of inconstancy.

We see this in a particular chapter of the book called The Connected Discourses of the Buddha^[3]—that's a chapter on the truths. There are three different ways in which these so-called Four Noble Truths are presented. The first presents it only as, "This is suffering; this is the arising; this is the ceasing; and this is the practice for the cessation of suffering." Those who really understand this, really penetrate this, reach the first stage of awakening. Rather than having a four-stage model of awakening, this text has a two-stage model, and this person is called a "trainee," because now they know what the practice is about. Someone who's let go deeply, and experiences deep freedom in the world of inconstancy, knows this freedom the Buddha was talking about. They know how to train now; they know what it's all about. So they're a trainee.

Someone who does the training of really resting, flowing, and repeatedly letting go into this inconstant flow of experience—at some point, they become fully awakened. At that point, this text says, "This is the Noble Truth of the arising of suffering, the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering, and the Noble Truth of the practice leading to the cessation of suffering." So there are two levels of this: one without the title "Four Noble Truths" and one with the title "Noble Truths." One for the first experience of liberation, and the other for becoming fully liberated.

The Buddha was fully liberated. They wanted to describe what someone who's fully liberated like a Buddha is like—that it no longer meant that he became reborn. As the centuries went along in Buddhism, the idea of not being reborn became increasingly important in these texts. That's where this first sermon of the Buddha was born, to explain that issue: how the Buddha doesn't get reborn. The text specifically says, as I said last week, it's the arising of suffering that is the craving that leads to rebirth. And the cessation of suffering is the cessation of that very craving that leads to rebirth.

That first sermon of the Buddha, then, has become the primary reference point for what the Four Noble Truths are. But in fact, there's something more profound, more important in these texts than that particular sermon. And that is: seeing a thought as it arises, seeing it as it persists, and seeing when it passes away. Seeing a feeling when it arises, persists, and ceases. Seeing sensations. Seeing everything as a flow of inconstant phenomena.

Easier said than done. But the result of it is liberation. And that is described: the people who are liberated are the happy ones, are the peaceful ones. There's a wonderful experience of happiness, peace, and delight that can come from liberation. That's the other side of suffering: to go through suffering to the other side, and come out and really taste and experience a profound form of joy and happiness that comes with a cessation of suffering.

So that's Nirodha^[4], the cessation, the Third Noble Truth. Next week I'll do the practice leading to the cessation of suffering, the fourth of the Four Noble Truths. Thank you so much.