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Four Noble Truths: Dukkha (5 of 5) The Clinging of Suffering

So this is the last of the five talks on suffering, on dukkha^[1]. That's part of a series of talks on the Four Noble Truths, and the First Noble Truth, the topic of this week. In the full formulation of it, it's called the Noble Truth of Suffering. In the earliest formulation of this, it was an insight described as, "one understands this is suffering."

This word "this," I think, is very important because it's specific. It's not a generalized view, theory, or set of generalized principles about life. When it's an insight—"this is suffering, this is unease, this is dis-ease, this is stress, this is painful," whatever way we want to translate the word dukkha—it is grounded in something specific, as opposed to the generalization that "life is suffering." That's a principle, but in the moment-to-moment experience, when there is dukkha, "this is it" is to recognize it.

It might seem like a drag to really pay attention to our suffering, pain, or stress. And it is a little bit; painful things are painful. But there's a way in which paying careful attention to it and learning how to attend to it wisely, with ease, and with mindfulness is a path to the freedom from suffering, to the end of it. That's not possible if we simply escape it or ignore it. That leaves us more on the surface of life. But there's an art, a way in which practice takes us deep into our life, deep to the other side of our dis-ease, our unease that we have, our dukkha.

One of the things that the Buddha said, as I talked about yesterday, is that whatever is impermanent, whatever is inconstant and changing, is suffering—is dukkha. And it is painful. But is it painful in and of itself, or where do we experience pain? In the most famous explanation of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha lays out, "This is the noble truth of suffering," and he asks the question, "What is suffering? What is painful? What is dukkha?" The way I hear this question is more like, "Where do we find dukkha? What is the experience? In what thing, when there's dukkha, where is it found?"

The answer is rather elaborate in the full elaboration of this, and I'll talk more about the full elaboration as we go through these weeks. It no longer becomes the direct insight into the immediacy of dukkha, but now we're going into a larger explanation, kind of an overview or a generalization of sorts. Be very careful not to get lost in the generalization if what we're trying to do is to practice with the specificity of our life, the details of our life.

But there is a wider elaboration, and I'll use the Pali word dukkha rather than translating it. As I've said, it could mean suffering, stress, unsatisfactoriness. Literally, it means painful. Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha. Sorrow, grief, sadness, pain, distress, and despair are dukkha. Association with the unloved is dukkha. Separation from the loved is dukkha. Not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five aggregates^[2] of clinging are dukkha.

This last statement is a powerful statement about how widespread and total the experience of dukkha can be in human life, and it has to do with these things called the five aggregates. When people explain this, they often treat these aggregates—a funny word in English—as having a technical meaning. But at its heart, it's playing on metaphors. The Buddha often uses metaphors to teach, and metaphors have a very different role in our lives than technical explanations that try to define technically what something is. Metaphors are evocative. They touch into our imagination and, through the imagination, maybe even to our emotional life. It gives us a visceral sense, experience, or association with what's being taught. So it's a much bigger, wider kind of participation in the teaching than just memorizing a technical definition of something.

One of the central metaphors the Buddha talks about is that of fire. This dukkha, whatever that might be, is sometimes seen as a fire that's burning us, and we are burning. The world is burning; in a certain way, it's burning with a fire. There are three primary fires that are burning. It's burning with the fire of greed, the fire of hatred, and the fire of delusion^[3] (or confusion or bewilderment). These fires hurt. These fires are singeing people, and sometimes it's just a little singe, sometimes it's a full-blown forest fire, or worse, a volcano that we experience within. It can be quite strong, and the fire can really create deep scars in our hearts and in our minds, this suffering, this dukkha that we have.

If you look around the world, the world is on fire. There's so much suffering, there's so much pain, there's so much distress, there's so much stress that people are living under now. Here in the United States, they say that one in five children are now living in hunger. Normally before the COVID-19 era, it was something like one in ten, which was still astronomically high, but so many people have lost their work now. So there's a certain kind of fire, the fire of hungry bellies in children. It's so painful that this should be the case. That's what is meant by the fires that come from greed, hatred, and delusion. That's what the Buddha is primarily focusing on. When the Buddha keeps using the word suffering over and over again, it's very closely associated with these sometimes powerful mental attitudes, motivations, and mental states of greed, hatred, and delusion which, when very compulsive and strong, are like fires that will destroy lives.

So the metaphor for suffering is fire. Especially at the time of the Buddha, with household fires, keeping people warm was dependent on firewood. A bundle of wood, a cord of wood, a branch, a stick of wood, or the trunk of a tree is a khandha^[4]. That is the word that somehow ended up translated into Buddhist English as aggregates. It sometimes just means a bundle or collection of something, but it specifically also means a piece of wood or a bundle of wood. That's the fuel or the basis upon which the fire grows.

The next step in this metaphor is the word upādāna^[5], which can mean clinging. The five aggregates of clinging. Upādāna also means fuel. So the khandhas, these bundles of wood, are fuel. The gasoline we put on the wood so it really burns is the fuel. This combination of the firewood, the fuel, and the fire that comes from it uses the same word to mean clinging and fuel. It means that clinging is the fuel for the fire. Clinging is what fans the flames of our suffering. Clinging is what keeps it going. So whenever there's reactivity that has to do with some kind of clinging, that's adding more fuel to the fire.

But what do we cling to? Clinging requires something you are clinging to. It's these khandhas, these bundles of stuff, this mass of wood. There's always something that we're clinging to, and what we're clinging to are these five aggregates, these five bundles, these five cords of wood. When the Buddha says, "in short and to summarize, what is this suffering?", he's saying it's these five bundles of clinging. It's these five bunches of wood that are the fuel for the fire. That's where the fire is; the fire isn't the clinging itself.

What's important about this is that the suffering, the ill, the stress, the painfulness he's talking about here is the pain or the suffering that comes from clinging, from upādāna. This is a bit of a tautology. What is the suffering that the Buddha is talking about? It's not everything we might in English call painful or suffering, but it's the suffering that arises from clinging. Whenever there's clinging, whenever there's craving, there will be suffering every time. Maybe some of us are saying, "I'm suffering," and it might not involve clinging, but what the Buddha is addressing is that suffering that arises with the clinging. Clinging hurts. If you clench your fist for a long time, it'll hurt. The release of that clenching is freedom for the fist.

Now, this understanding means that the world of suffering, the world of impermanence we're looking at, is the world of what we cling to. If we cling to what's impermanent, what's inconstant, what's flowing, then we will suffer. If we're standing in a river and we're trying to stop the river, it's not going to work. If we try to take a fistful of water and hold it in our hand, it's not going to work. If we try to move the river by pushing against the bank and have it flow in a different direction, it's not going to work. Fighting, resisting, or clinging to the river doesn't really work. If you pick up a bucket full of water and go back to town and say, "Look, I have the river in the bucket," that's silly. You have water in the bucket, you don't have the river. Clinging to the river of life that's changing is guaranteed to be a source of stress and to be painful.

The alternative is to see this world of impermanence, change, and inconstancy, and to relate to it in a new way, so that the changing world becomes the medicine for our life, not the illness, the poison, or the fire. The five aggregates—the five bundles of who we are: our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental formations, and our consciousness—are constantly changing, unfolding phenomena. If we cling to them, we will suffer. But if you allow the psychosomatic ways in which we experience and see ourselves to just flow and move, then we can find our ease. Then we can find our freedom.

This is part of the task of the Second Noble Truth, which we'll start again on Monday. The Second Noble Truth goes deeper into this world of suffering, how it arises, and how to find freedom. In a minute or so, I'll take some questions if you'd like. I'll stay here for a little while, and since it's Friday, it's nice to have a little back and forth.

For those of you who like the 7:00 a.m. time to sit, Nikki Mirghafori, one of the teachers here at Insight Meditation Center, is going to offer a 7:00 a.m. sitting tomorrow morning. I think she teaches happy hour, so I think she's going to probably do some kind of loving-kindness practice. I'm not sure, but she's a great teacher, and you have some continuity into Saturday if you want. That'll be on Zoom rather than on YouTube, so you have to go to IMC's calendar to find your way with that. So we'll see what kind of questions you might have.

Q&A

Q: When one comes to the end of suffering, are the outward causes of suffering still present, but the relationship to them has changed? Does it end if clinging ends?

It's a good question. Maybe it's useful to make a distinction, for the purposes of understanding the Buddha's teachings, between causes and conditions. The conditions for suffering are in the world, but the primary cause—if we use the word cause that we're interested in as practitioners, and I want to emphasize this phrase "as practitioners"—is different. If we're really walking the path to try to come to the end of suffering, at that time, in that context, in those circumstances, the direction of attention is not to the conditions outside, but rather to the contribution we make to our suffering. This is a very mature, very strong, courageous thing to do.

There are definitely, in conventional language, causes for suffering in the external world. We wouldn't deny that, and we don't want to stop taking care of that in the proper way. But if we want to set our heart at ease in this deep, liberated way that the Buddha emphasized, at that time we turn around and we really look, "What is my contribution to it?" So we would say that the conditions for suffering are external, but the cause for it is in our own hearts, in our own clinging.

As the person says here, yes, it's our relationship that changes. We're no longer relating with clinging, or we're relating with openness and ease, and then perhaps we can be wiser. So if clinging ends, the suffering that we contribute—our contribution to our pain or difficulty—ends as well. Since some of the deepest existential suffering we have arises from clinging, it's phenomenal to go through this process of coming to the end of clinging.

Q: Even when I can connect with deep peace, there's some part of me that's on guard like a sentinel that can't seem to let go. How to practice with this?

You want to befriend the sentinel. You want to sit down next to your sentinel, next to that guard, and accompany it. Listen to it, feel it, get to know it, spend time with it. Don't be in a hurry to stop being on guard. Really kind of bring easeful, kind, loving attention to it and really get to know it. Listen to it. Hear what it has to say, and get a sense of what it's really afraid of. Maybe that fear that underlies the sentinel needs your love.

Q: What's the difference between ease and complacency?

If you're really mindful and really attentive to it, really sensitive, and can feel and tune into what complacency is like, you'll find some kind of stress, dis-ease, pain, or suffering as part of it. It doesn't feel good to be complacent. There is a kind of resistance, a kind of shutting down, a narrowing, or a constriction. Ease is the opposite. Ease is a sense of openness, a sense of possibility, a sense of no resistance to what's going on. Ease can come with a lot of care and attention. Complacency is, "So what, you know, it doesn't matter." Ease just means that our care—and understanding that it does matter—is held in a peaceful way.

Q: You've made it much easier to be with the hindrances. Great, fantastic. I have stopped reading and watching all news because my perceptions and mental formations get activated. Must I continue to be without these current events in order to maintain some kind of serenity?

Maybe for the time being you need to do that. Maybe eventually you don't. But you know, there's good reason to lose your serenity and to be agitated by the news, because a lot of it is written in order to arouse emotions, in order to make people excited. It's kind of a genre of writing which is trying to get us to buy newspapers, get excited, and believe what's being said.

It is good to have some sense of what's happening in the world, and there are places you can go to read the news that are laid out with much less of an emotional charge than some of the major news outlets. I like to say that all the major news is also found in Wikipedia. Whether Wikipedia is less or more accurate than some of the newspapers, I tend to think it's more balanced. There's very little emotional charge in Wikipedia, so you can read it there.

The other thing that is good with the news is that most news is old. Things haven't changed so much over the millennia, really, at the heart of it all. It's not necessary to know the news when it's new. It is useful to be well-informed, but you don't have to be up-to-date by the minute or even by the day. I found that very useful. Sometimes—I haven't done it for some years now—but there was a time I would regularly read the news a day, two, or three late. I saw that my relationship to the news changed. I knew it wasn't cutting-edge and up-to-date. So you might just kind of follow behind the news for a day or two, and maybe you'll have a whole different relationship to it. It won't take away your serenity so much.

Q: It's meaningful for me to know that aggregates are translated from bundle of wood. I feel I can understand more clearly about the five aggregates now.

Great, happy to hear that. There may be the risk of complicating things a little bit more, but there's a strong tendency in many teachers and scholars who talk about Buddhism to treat the five aggregates as the self. They'll say, "The Buddha says there's no self, but what's the self? These five processes, five activities called the five aggregates—that's what defines the human being." That's a very common statement.

However, if you go back and read the teachings of the Buddha, he never says it that way. He only says that these five bundles are what people get attached to when they cling. He doesn't claim that those five aggregates as a total is what makes up the human being. He actually never really wants to define the human being in its totality. He just wants people to be free, and the focus is on how these are things people tend to cling to. These concepts, these ideas, this particular way of dividing up the human being are a source of clinging.

There are other ways that he divides up the human being that he doesn't see as a source of suffering, as what we cling to so much. Oddly enough, he uses the word citta^[6] for the mind and kāya^[7] for the body. But if you really look and see how he talks about the mind and the body—this citta and kāya—that also is not what the person is. Rather, citta and kāya are how the mind constructs its experience of body and mind, and there's a way in which that's constructed that is not a problem. Citta is never seen to be suffering the way that the five aggregates of clinging are.

So if we generalize and see the five aggregates of clinging—the five bundles—to be everything we are as a human being, then it lends itself to all kinds of complicated questions about, "Well, if they drop away, if we don't cling to them, who are we?" The five aggregates are a particular thing; they define what we cling to, not who we are.

Okay, well, I think that it's eight o'clock and I actually have another teaching to do for an online retreat this week. In 15 minutes I'm supposed to be giving instructions there, so I think it would be of greater ease for me to stop now and get ready for the next. Thank you for this week, and thank you for our time together, and I look forward to next week when we go through the Second Noble Truth. Thank you.