Four Interpretations of the Second Noble Truth

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Gil Fronsdal: "Four Interpretations of the Second Noble Truth". It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 11, 2018. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Four Interpretations of the Second Noble Truth

I'd like to tell a story which I tell occasionally. I was told once that in the mid-1960s, there were three high school girls who lived someplace down here like in Mountain View and Menlo Park. Those of you who've been around long enough, near the corner of Alameda and Sand Hill was one of the local centers for the burgeoning LSD culture. The Grateful Dead were stationed there, and Ken Kesey^[1] was down there, and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test bus started from there. It's very important for the history of the times. And so it was a period of a lot of LSD.

These girls learned that there was a Zen teacher in San Francisco who could teach them how to get high naturally. So they went up there to see Shunryu Suzuki^[2], Suzuki Roshi, in the old Japanese Sōtō Zen temple in Japantown. He welcomed them in, and they asked him the question, "How do you get high naturally?" He proceeded to give them a talk on the Four Noble Truths^[3]: suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, the Noble Eightfold Path to the cessation of suffering. This is not what these girls were expecting or wanting, except that the man who was teaching them these truths about suffering, he was so happy. At least for one of those young women, his happiness was so contagious or so meaningful that she's been a Buddhist practitioner ever since, became a Zen student.

So this good juxtaposition of the focus on suffering and happiness, in a sense, they go together in the sense that the Four Noble Truths are meant to help us address suffering in such a way we come out the other side into happiness, into well-being, into peace. I was thinking about this this morning. The Buddhists who really understand the Four Noble Truths and their value become a little bit like firefighters where they go towards the fire everyone else might go away from.

This willingness to look at suffering, to study it, to stop for it, to really take it in, not to suffer better, but rather to really address it deeply. Not a few people have been quite moved by their encounter with Buddhism because, some people say this explicitly, that it's the first time in their lives that they met some teaching that addressed the issue of suffering in human life. Whereas everywhere else they had been in their life to that point, people seemed to avoid it, distract themselves from it, run away from it. It's a tender and important and profound issue of the human condition that we have suffering of all kinds of different types, from the most mild to some of the biggest possible things we can experience. So it's a tender thing. It's a delicate thing to talk about because it touches something that's very primal to many of us. But this is what the purpose of the Four Noble Truths is, to address it, to understand it.

What I want to talk about today is not the whole Four Noble Truths, but rather the Second Noble Truth. The Second Noble Truth is most popularly understood as being the cause of suffering. Whereas in fact, in the ancient texts teaching the Buddha, he doesn't say that, but it's often interpreted that way. Rather, there are four different interpretations for what the Second Noble Truth is. Most literally, the wording of it says it's the noble truth of the arising of suffering. So there are four interpretations of what this might mean, and to hear these four is a little bit of a journey. I'd like to think of it as a journey.

They're available just to understand these different interpretations and different perspectives, different angles with which to understand our suffering and what underlies them or how to get deeper into it in a meaningful way. But they can also be a journey of getting more settled, where the mindfulness gets stronger, our being, our mind, our hearts get more and more settled and peaceful. As we get more concentrated and still and the mindfulness gets stronger, we start seeing in new ways. We become more sensitive to bigger pieces of the picture of what's happening. And so more information is available to us. As that more information about suffering becomes available, we can start having a different relationship to it, or that information can have a different effect on us. The effect that in Buddhism we're looking for is liberation, liberation from suffering, the cessation of suffering.

The First Interpretation: The Cause of Suffering

So the first interpretation, and the one that's probably most commonly taught, is the idea that our suffering is caused by a certain kind of insistent desire. Insistent desire is usually translated into English by the word craving^[4]. It's a certain kind of compulsion, a certain kind of energetic desire. Or even desire for useful and appropriate things can be a little bit too insistent, a little bit too much. I can aspire to something, but if there's an attitude of "I've got to do this," there can be a lot of expectation involved, a lot of need associated with them. And so this sense of insistence that can come with desire can be a source of tremendous suffering. We're holding on to something, we want something so desperately.

In ordinary life sometimes this can be seen relatively easily in different circumstances, that we want something but we can't have it. The conditions have changed or such and we can't have it, and we realize that "If I keep wanting this, I'm just going to keep being disappointed or keep being frustrated, so I'll drop it."

It could be that your internet doesn't work. For some people that's a serious thing. And so you can feel all the desires that come along with being on your device and on your computer. The power outage doesn't get fixed for a while. At some point you realize, "This desire, I better let go of it for now. I better not hold on to it." Because if I pace my house, keep trying the router and the modem over and over again, and try to shake the computer upside down to see if I can make it work over and over again, that frustration, that insistence, that desperation is not going to be for my betterment. And so at some point it's put down and you realize, "Okay, nothing I can do here. I certainly want the internet to come back on, but I can't do anything, I have to wait."

A few people would just sit quietly, meditate, and go out and work in the garden or sit and have a cup of tea or do something nice. Some people would rush out, of course, to the coffee shop, the library, anywhere where it might be. But you probably have your own examples of seeming to have some insistent desire or something you want, something you can't have. And so you don't necessarily deny the desire, you try to drop it. You drop having it be active, because if you keep having it active, the frustration is going to be there, that expectation is going to be there. So to see the cause.

Some things are relatively easy and some things are quite difficult to see the underlying cause for them. That's why something like meditation can settle the mind enough that sometimes we can see more deeply than the surface chatter of the mind, and we can see some of the deeper causes for our suffering. It might be that what we really want, the real cause, is a clinging or desire to be seen, to be respected, to have certain status. Within reason that could be appropriate, but that can be overdone. To see how that underlying drive for identity and underlying drive to be seen operates might be hard because it manifests itself in a desire for something else. It could be the desire for wearing a nice set of clothes. "I better wear the right clothes, and all my clothes are dirty," or "I don't have nice clothes, and I better find nice clothes." And you sit and be quiet and you notice that the desire, the drive for clothes, is really an expression of a deeper desire. And so as we sit quietly, we sometimes start seeing these deeper causes, the desires that are behind it.

Sometimes it's quite hard to find the cause, and even if we do find the underlying cause, some of these things that drive us and motivate us are hard just to drop and put down. Sometimes there are such almost primal urges that arise within us that even if someone points it out or we see it clearly, how do we drop it? How do we stop being this way? It's difficult.

The Second Interpretation: The Conditions for Suffering

So if we practice something like meditation and are able to get quieter and stiller, one of the things that happens is the mindfulness, the awareness can open up to see a greater piece of the mental ecology of the things that are going on. We start seeing not just the immediate cause, or what we would call the cause, we see the range of conditions that have to come into play for the suffering to be there. This is the second interpretation of the Second Noble Truth. It's the truth of the conditions that bring about the suffering.

Now the value about the conditions is that it's a bigger range of things to study and be aware of. Some of those conditions you might have more control over than the cause itself.

I'll give you a little bit of an analogy. We have in this conference room here, a little room on the side, a little space heater we plug into the electrical outlet when we want to use it. Now every once in a while, when it's cold, someone will plug it in and have it run, and they'll forget to unplug it or to turn it off. They come in the next day and the room is like a sauna. So that's not very good. So what to do? We can be upset with all the people who use it. We could send out emails and say, "Anybody who uses it, please remember to unplug it." And we do that, and then some months later it happens again. And so then we can get frustrated. We really want this to be unplugged and not be running overnight. And so we could put up big signs. We could do all kinds of things.

The cause, in a sense, of the heater being on is those people who don't unplug it after using it. So we can be upset about the people. The other option, which we finally figured out, is now we have a little device that plugs into the outlet that has a timer on it. Now we plug the electrical cord from the space heater into that outlet. In order to have that electricity go to the space heater, you have to choose one hour, two hours, three hours. And now if someone forgets, it'll go off automatically. So the electricity in the outlet is just a condition for having the heater work. It's not the cause for it being left on, but it's part of the conditions that are needed. So we address the underlying condition rather than what we would call the cause.

The same thing with our suffering sometimes. If you understand more of the pieces of what's involved, we can start identifying the conditions of our suffering that might not be called the cause. All kinds of things can be a condition, but one example would be that if a person is really challenged by strong desire, maybe addictive desire, say it's alcohol. If there's a bottle of alcohol on the table, that bottle is not the cause of going to get a drink. The person going for the drink would be considered the cause in itself, but the bottle there is a condition. Seeing it as a condition for drinking, if the bottle is not on the table or the bottle is not even at home, then the chances of the addictive desire rearing up so strongly is not going to be there. So sometimes we can take care, we can do something about the condition and not the cause.

A strong desire for, you know, some people don't have an addiction there, but they have a weakness for donuts. And then they feel bad about themselves afterwards because they've succumbed to the donut thing. So don't go to that coffee shop where they sell donuts. Go to the coffee shop that doesn't sell any sweets, because that's a condition, right? So you could say, "Well, you should grow up maybe and deal with your strong desire and just kind of overcome the cause of it, your desire, and get on with it." But that's kind of unrealistic sometimes in human lives.

So what are the underlying conditions? One of the underlying conditions that Buddhism emphasizes is something called ignorance^[5]. This is kind of a misunderstanding about things. For example, there can be a misunderstanding of what brings happiness. We might think that pleasure brings happiness, and so we pursue pleasure. Certainly, there are good feelings that come with pleasure, but it's not really a heartfelt happiness there. And so the confusion, the ignorance about what brings happiness can lead people to pursue the wrong pursuit, that sometimes lends itself to further suffering.

To be ignorant, to have this ignorance about what happiness is—that it is different than pleasure—it can be one of the conditions. If that condition changes, then we're not going to pursue pleasure in inappropriate ways.

It might be that the underlying condition might be a belief. The desire is to be in a certain kind of intimate relationship with someone, and there's a strong insistent desire or a need to be in the relationship or to hold on to that relationship. If we start looking deeper for the conditions for that insistence, there are some people for whom it's a strong desire for security, to feel safe in this world. Being in that relationship creates a certain kind of safety. But then the question is, is that the best place, the best way to be safe? If that's really the need, is there another way to be safe that doesn't depend on another person providing it? And so there's this maybe kind of ignorance about where safety resides.

There can be ignorance about the permanence of things. People can believe that certain things are going to be here all the time, and then when they go away there's a lot of suffering. But when we have a sense that everything changes, everything comes and goes, and it's that certain things go and people die for sure, but it's not an insult. Reality hasn't betrayed us because we have a flat tire. It hasn't betrayed us because we get sick and maybe die. It's kind of built into the human condition to some degree to have things come and go, appear, disappear, be born, then die. How we live in the world of birth and death is a tender and delicate thing, but it shouldn't be unexpected. I shouldn't be holding on that it has to be this way forever. So that's a condition that goes into all this.

As we sit and get deeper into ourselves and get settled enough, we can start seeing some of the different thoughts and ideas and feelings and impulses that are holding this whole kind of desire thing in place. We start seeing some of the underlying conditions that go on, and some of those conditions then can be shifted and changed better than sometimes the drive for the desire. But then the desire changes once the underlying conditions have changed.

The Third Interpretation: Craving Itself is Suffering

So we go further. As we get more settled and more still and more aware, there's a greater sensitivity, a kind of physical, visceral sensitivity to what's happening here. The third interpretation of the Second Noble Truth, the truth of the arising of suffering, is that a strong, insistent desire, craving, is suffering.

It's not that it can be the cause of suffering, or it can be a condition for suffering, but in and of itself, to have this craving, this clinging neediness, this obsession with a desire, that in itself can feel tense and come with a contraction. It can come with a kind of fever sometimes, a kind of pushing and demanding, a kind of feeling that we're not in control of our own life. You can feel the tension, the irritation, how in and of itself craving is uncomfortable.

So rather than needing to convince ourselves that what we want is not the right thing, or that having desire is not useful, we have a visceral feeling that having the desire in this kind of way is not healthy. Some people will only give up certain desires when they feel that that strong insistent desiring feels so uncomfortable to have. "Why would I do this to myself?" The stiller and quieter the mind is in meditation, the more ease and peace we have in meditation, the less willingness or interest we have to allow ourselves to continue to feel the discomfort of having insistent desire.

If you're basically uncomfortable already and you're running around being busy in your life, what is a little bit more discomfort? You don't even notice it. The discomfort of desire is kind of subtle, and you have bigger things to be uncomfortable about, so you hardly notice. That's one of the advantages of something like meditation, so that we can start feeling the discomforts in our lives that we usually don't notice, usually ignore. We don't make this the big advertisement for meditation: "Come and be uncomfortable! This is where you can really do discomfort well." [Laughter] So don't let the secret out.

But to some degree, that's one of the functions of meditation: to get concentrated and still enough to really see the impact on ourselves of how the mind operates and to feel the impact of these desires. It's better to know you're uncomfortable than to not know it, because if you know it, then you can do something about it. You might not even know what the desire is for. You don't have to know what it's for, all you have to know is, "It's uncomfortable, and I'll let go of it. I'll settle down."

I've had that sensation outside, I'm currently quite capable of having this urge, like I'm supposed to want to desire something. I don't know what yet, but I'll figure that out later! To just feel what that urge is like, and to realize that to crave, to have an insistent desire itself is uncomfortable, is a kind of suffering. That's a third level of the Second Noble Truth.

The Fourth Interpretation: The Arising and Passing Away

The fourth level, and this is most closely associated with meditation, is learning how to find a way in meditation where mindfulness becomes quite strong, the whole system has gotten quite still and peaceful.

In a situation where we're concentrated and still and mindful, there's a way in which there's kind of a reversal. The more still we can become, the more we tune into how things are constantly changing. The more we're agitated, spinning in our thoughts, the more we have this illusion that things are much more still and permanent and solid than they actually are.

As we get stiller and stiller, we start seeing that we're more in the present moment, more in the flow of the experience happening now. We're not thinking about the past and thinking about the future. We're not rehearsing the same thing over and over and over again, which gives a semblance of permanence because we keep repeating the same ideas. The thinking mind has gotten quiet, and then whatever is going on in the present moment feels more like a flow, more like an unfolding. It's more the arising and passing, the appearances and disappearances of things.

So we have a thought, and the appearance of a thought is more significant than what we're thinking. Often we're concerned by what we're thinking, but the fact is, "Well, there's a thought. I have better things to do than think. I was sitting here peacefully minding my own business. Why would I now get involved in this thought?" And then it passes away, or we let go of it.

We start seeing that the body sensations we have are actually kind of a dance, a kaleidoscope dance of sensations appearing and disappearing. What seemed like a solid sensation turns out to be pixels of sensations that come and go. The emotions that we thought were so solid—you know, we were just in this mood—it hasn't gone away exactly, but the mood itself comes and goes in and out of perception. We're aware of it, we're not aware of it. And there's this constant shifting, changing panorama of what we're aware of happening in the moment. Some things arise and pass, sometimes the perception shifts and takes in something else for a moment. There's this wonderful flow that people have.

What people start seeing more and more acutely is what's called the arising and ceasing of things. As I said, the literal wording of the Second Noble Truth, the way it's described, is the noble truth of the arising of suffering. The Third Noble Truth is the noble truth of the ceasing, the cessation of suffering.

At times, we start seeing things arise and pass, and arise and pass. This is a very different way of relating to suffering. Our suffering is still there, but we see that it's not constant. There are gaps in it. It's part of this dance and flow of things. The mind has a way of attributing permanence to our suffering. We kind of hold it in a package, or this is fixed, it's stuck, it's heavy, it's solid. "I'm here with my suffering, this is what it is." It can be so dense and so impenetrable that it's hard to have a different relationship to it. We're kind of stuck in it.

But if we're quiet enough and still enough with the mindfulness and start seeing that whatever this thing is that we're calling suffering is made up of phenomena that are arising and passing and coming and going, it's not solid. It's actually not so stuck. It's just like everything else, it's phenomena that comes and goes. Then the grip, the holding, the clinging, the insistence we have on those desires begin to lighten up. Our identification with the desire begins to lighten up. Our being glued to it becomes unglued. We step back. We're not through yet; we may have more of a sense of that panoramic view of it than being kind of stuck in the middle of it.

Seeing the arising and passing of phenomena is considered one of the ways in and of itself that begins to help the mind release the fist of clinging, the way in which we hold onto things or push on things. It doesn't require understanding the cause. It doesn't require understanding the condition. It doesn't require seeing that craving is itself suffering. It's just seeing how things arise and pass. It shows us a whole different paradigm for what's happening in the moment, and how it doesn't make any sense to cling. It doesn't actually work to cling in this experience. It's not worth clinging to things that are coming and going all the time, in this moment of experience now.

If you pull yourself out of this quiet place and start debating with yourself, "Well, some things are really worth clinging to," you can have a wonderful debate with yourself and come up with great things to cling to. However, you've left that quiet world where things are coming and going and arising and passing, where things are peaceful. You don't have access to the kind of peace and the letting go that arising and passing can give. Then, of course, this experience of inconstancy^[6] can't help us because we're not in touch with it if we go back up into the conceptual world of thinking about what's true.

Reflections

So four interpretations of the Second Noble Truth. In different circumstances of our life, different ones of them are relevant and useful. In different circumstances, different ones of them are accessible to us.

Sometimes it's helpful to see the cause, and exploring and considering the cause is really good. However, for some people, that's the only approach they have. And sometimes, only reviewing and thinking and analyzing, looking for the cause can be a dead end. It doesn't open up for people what's going on. So it's useful, but sometimes it's not.

Sometimes what's accessible and useful is to look at the conditions. What are all the conditions in place for me to want this? Sometimes those conditions have to do with things that happened in childhood, big influences on us that once we understand those early childhood conditions, then we understand why we have certain drives, why we have the cause of certain desires we have today. So conditions is an interesting world. And sometimes it's quite simple: we see we have a certain belief. Once we see the underlying belief, we see that belief doesn't work, but the belief is the condition for the desire.

The third is sometimes it's just so obvious how uncomfortable I am having this desire. I don't care about the cause. I don't care about the conditions for it. Let's drop it, it's not worth it. I'm feeling so uncomfortable.

And then the fourth approach has to do with seeing how things come and go, the impermanent, constantly changing nature. "Oh, here comes a desire, here comes a suffering, I guess I'll just ride the wave. I know that some waves are short, some waves are big, and if I just ride the wave of discomfort, I'm not gonna make it worse." But if you don't simply say, "Oh, here it is, I'm going to ride the discomfort," but rather, "I'm going to fight it, I'm going to hold on to it, I'm going to engage in it, I'm going to analyze, think, I'm gonna look for the cause"—sometimes looking for the cause is the cause, or the looking for the cause perpetuates the identification. Sometimes it's just wise to see, "Oh, here it comes, I'll just ride the wave." If you're lucky, it's a short wave. And if you get invested in it or get identified with it, then it's usually a longer wave.

So four different approaches to this Four Noble Truths, each of them in their own time and place. I think it shows you the richness that this kind of teaching that the Buddha has for us as we apply it.

One of the points I wanted to get across is that we do have different states of mind that we live in. The approach and the understanding of our life varies in states of mind. If we only have one state of mind that we always live in, we only have access to certain approaches. Part of the function of meditation is to help us go into different states of mind. Not necessarily altered states in some dramatic way, so you don't get frightened about that, but states of mind where you're peaceful or quiet, they're still, so that you can be more sensitive and see in a different way.

And then, when some high school students come to you and ask you how to be happy naturally, you'll just light up and give them a talk about the Four Noble Truths. And maybe you'll inspire them.