“In a world of tension and breakdown it is necessary for there to
be those who seek to integrate their inner lives not by avoiding sorrow and
anguish and running from their problems, but by facing them in their naked
reality and ordinariness.” ~Thomas Merton
Anyone who has had even the briefest introduction to Buddhist
teaching is familiar with its starting point: the inescapable truth that
existence entails suffering. This is called the First Noble Truth. But how
difficult it is to fully embrace this truth. When I first became a monk in the
forest monastery, Ajahn Chah welcomed me and then said, “I hope you’re not
afraid to suffer.” Taken aback by this greeting I asked him what he meant. He
continued, “There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run
away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face
directly, and in doing so become free.” Of all the maps of Buddhist psychology,
the Noble Truths, which teach the understanding of suffering and its end, are
the most central. The whole purpose of Buddhist psychology, its ethics,
philosophy, practices and community life is the discovery that freedom and joy
are possible in the face of the sufferings of human life. The Four Noble Truths
are laid out like a psychological diagnosis: the symptoms, the causes, the
possibility of healing and the medicinal path.
As healers, therapists, or friends, when people come to us for
help, we are first a witness to their suffering. Whatever form that suffering
takes – conflict, fear, depression, stress, obsession, confusion, mental
illness, divorce, trouble with work, family or the law, unfulfilled creativity,
or unrequited love – we must willingly acknowledge its truth.
We are also witness to their pain. Buddhist psychology makes a
clear distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is an unavoidable aspect of
the natural world. It is physical, biological and social, woven into our
existence as night is with day, as inevitable as hard and soft, as hot and
cold. Inhabiting a human body, we experience a continuous ebb and flow of
pleasure and pain, gain and loss. Inhabiting our human society is the same; we
encounter praise and blame, fame and disrepute, success and failure, arising
and passing endlessly.
Suffering is different from pain. Suffering is our reaction to
the inevitable pain of life. Our personal suffering can include anxiety,
depression, fear, confusion, grief, anger, hurt, addiction, jealousy,
frustration. But suffering is not only personal. Our collective suffering
includes the sorrows of warfare and racism, the isolation and torture of
prisoners everywhere, the hunger, sickness and abandonment of human beings on
every continent. Our individual and collective suffering is called the First
Noble Truth of Suffering.
The Second Noble Truth describes the cause of suffering:
grasping. Grasping, it explains, gives birth to aversion and delusion, the
three roots of all unhealthy states. From these three roots arise all other
unhealthy states such as jealousy, anxiety, hatred, addiction, possessiveness
and shamelessness. These are the causes of individual and global suffering.
The Third Noble Truth offers us the way out, the end of
suffering. Unlike pain, suffering is not inevitable. Freedom from
suffering is possible when we let go of our reactions, our fear and grasping.
This freedom is called Nirvana. This is the Third Noble Truth.
The Fourth Noble Truth is the path to the end of suffering. This
path is called the middle way. The middle way invites us to find peace wherever
we are, here and now. By neither grasping nor resisting life, we can find
wakefulness and freedom in the midst of our joys and sorrows. Following the
middle path we establish integrity, we learn to quiet the mind, we learn to see
with wisdom.
- Jack Kornfield, excerpted
from The Wise Heart
No comments:
Post a Comment