Essay #24: The Incompleteness of Everything and the Four Noble Truths

After spending 6 years with several Hindu “how-to” experts in the field of enlightenment and trying their methods, Siddhārtha Gautama sat down beneath the Bodhi Tree determined not to arise until he had become fully awake.  Following a period of 49 days spent in meditation, at 35 years of age, Gautama attained enlightenment and became the Buddha.  The term, “buddha,” does not indicate divinity.  It means one who is awake.  It applies to one who has come to see the way things are, one who has overcome samsara, strictly the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation, and more generally the illusions one subscribes to that lead to rebirth.  The condition in which samsara is overcome is nirvana, which strictly means “the blowing out of the fires of the mind.”  These fires are craving, aversion, and ignorance.  These are the three types of illusion which keep a person, so to speak, coming back for more, whereas in nirvana one transcends the earthly pull entirely and partakes of a different way of being altogether.  Buddhists distinguish two kinds of nirvana.  One is attained while still living in a physical body and another at death, when all traces of physical life and the need to be reborn disappear.  The fact that Gautama remained on earth and taught after he had attained nirvana proves that he had also become a bodhisattva, one who delays his exit from the physical world out of compassion for all other sentient beings in order to help them on their path to buddhahood.

Once he had attained enlightenment, Buddha went to the Deer Park near modern-day Benares in Northern India.  There he delivered his first sermon to five disciples.  In this sermon, he taught the Four Noble Truths, which comprise the core of his vision of reality.  His four truths bring to light:

1. The incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness of everything
2. That which gives rise to unsatisfactoriness
3. The cessation of unsatisfactoriness, and
4. The path leading to the cessation of unsatisfactoriness.

The Pali term that Buddha used which is commonly translated as “unsatisfactoriness” is dukkha.  Additional translations of dukkha, which may be helpful, include:  suffering, pain, discomfort, uneasiness, sorrow, distress, grief, misery, and unhappiness.  Dukkha may imply any or all of these.  An illustration of dukkha used in ancient texts was the disjointed bone of a compound fracture sticking out through the skin.  About this term, Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein observes:

The word is made up of the prefix du and the root kha. Du means “bad” or “difficult.” Kha means “empty.” “Empty,” here, refers to several things—some specific, others more general. One of the specific meanings refers to the empty axle hole of a wheel. If the axle fits badly into the center hole, we get a very bumpy ride. This is a good analogy for our ride through saṃsāra.¹

We could expand on this illustration by saying that the cart we are riding through samsara arrived incomplete straight out of the factory.  It never got its proper wheel bearings so that its axles are badly fitted into the center of its wheels, and we get a consistently bumpy ride.  Imagine, for a minute, that the cart is not a cart but is the whole planet Earth wobbling on its axis and you begin to get a sense of the severity of the problem that Buddha was pointing to.   The problem is not only bigger than we are; there is no way to fix it.  That is, there is no way within the context of worldly life to fix it.  Within that context we are ruled by all the passions, cravings, and aversions that we are accustomed to, the so-called “fires of the mind.”  In short, we are caught up in a struggle for satisfaction and against dissatisfaction that often finds us competing, elbowing, confused, and desperately looking for a way out. We can imagine that this was the case well before Buddha’s own time, and we readily find this frustration in our own.   We may cite the words of Mose Allison from a popular jazz ballad:

Stop this world, let me off
There’s just too many pigs in the same trough
There’s too many buzzards sitting on the fence
Stop this world, it’s not making sense.²

The uniqueness of Buddha’s insight into the “bad-empty” nature of worldly existence lies in his understanding of dependent origination.  Buddha tells us that all the qualities of the things that make up our world arise in pairs, not alone.  Hot/cold, white/black, wet/dry, heavy/light, sharp/dull, sweet/sour, for example, all arise together and cannot be known singly but only in relation to the other member of its pair.  Each member is therefore dependent on its opposite in order both to be and to be known.  Moreover, each member contains the seed of its opposite in itself.  Together the members represent poles of an oscillation, not stable entities that can be contained and controlled.  Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as pure being, just becoming somewhere within this oscillation between some quality and its opposite. The same can be said of the aggregates of qualities that make up objects.  They, too, are constantly becoming, changing, unfixable, and incomplete.  So the sweet rose we adore stands side by side with the sour rotting orange.  Likewise, the beautiful sight of a lush mountain valley borders the unseemly view of a city garbage dump.  One thing—just like one quality–bears the other inside itself insofar as our knowing and interpretation of it is always shaped by our experience of its opposite.

If this is true of the objects we know, then it must also be true of our knowing and interpretation as well.  That is, dependent origination is also a feature of our mind’s responses.  If heat is pleasant to us and cold unpleasant, for example, pleasure and pain are known only in context with one another.  Pleasure contains pain within itself and exists only as part of a pleasure/pain oscillation.  There is no way to fix it so that pleasure remains only pleasure and never becomes pain.  Rather, becoming is all that we can be sure of.  One moment heat is pleasurable and the next it is painful when the hot water in our bath becomes too hot.  At that moment cold becomes pleasurable.  What was formerly pleasure is now pain, and what now becomes pleasure is fully ready to become pain since it contains the seed of pain in itself.

Gautama was born into luxury and spent the first 29 years of his life as a prince shielded by his farther from any exposure among the people to sickness, aging, or suffering.   Even so, it is said that the future Buddha intuited that material wealth could not provide ultimate satisfaction.  When he once caught sight of an aged man outside his palace, the prince went on numerous further trips beyond its walls.  He came into the site of a diseased man, a rotting corpse, and a gaunt religious ascetic.  Thus he began to understand what other pole his fortune was linked to, and he began to seriously inquire how to deal with this state of affairs.   What his mind had not seen had kept him locked into a one-sided and, hence, illusory view of the world.  With exposure to the formerly concealed destabilizing pole of reality, he felt the full force of this oscillation and had to confront both the collapse of his play palace and the deplorable state of his own mind.  Once again in the words of Mose Allison:

Well, it seems my little playhouse has fallen down
I think my little ship has run aground
I feel like I’m in the wrong place
My state of mind is a disgrace.

We, of course, may hear this song and secretly hold out that Mose is not singing about us.  We may believe that we have got things so “wrapped up”—got our ship so trimmed out—that we will never run aground, let alone attribute that to the state of our very own mind.  The Buddha, however, taught differently.  The second of his Noble Truths informs us that it is just such ignorance combined with craving, aversion, or both that perpetuates the unsatisfactoriness of worldly life.  We may succeed for a while in living under the illusion that we “have it all together,” but inevitably the blow will come.  Inevitably some quality opposite to that which we are clinging to will show up in the middle of our lives. Some unwelcome response or interpretation will intrude into our minds despite our best efforts to retain control.  Like Buddha, we will catch site of an aged man or sick man or a corpse, and the uncomfortable awareness will dawn in us that we are looking at ourselves.  At that moment not only our own efforts but life itself will appear impermanent and incomplete.

Then what?

As the Buddha teaches us in his Third Noble Truth, we then have the choice to begin to wake up.  The first glimmer of wakefulness arrives with the insight that clinging to one or the other of a pair of opposite qualities in oscillation with one another is neither a recipe for happiness nor is it even something that is possible.  Wakefulness begins to dawn as we come into the same fundamental insight into the nature of things that the Buddha had.

This is not an easy insight to come by while the mind itself is carried away in craving and aversion.  We have to stop or at least slow down the rollicking cart before we can begin to carefully observe its motion and come to know that what the Buddha has said is true.  He never meant for anyone to take it on faith.  This is why he instructed people in the practice of meditation.  He knew that stopping and seeing go together and that only through a diligent investigation into one’s own experience would ignorance begin to fall away and insight take its place.  The way of the Buddha is most certainly not a way of faith.  Rather, the path of craving and clinging to the qualities and contingencies of this world—and of pushing the same away,– that is a path of faith badly placed in a set of illusions conjured up by the mind alone and not inherent in the fabric of reality.  On the other hand, we can begin to actually observe that attachment and aversion themselves produce dissatisfaction since they are at odds with the impermanence of the things of this world.  That stops us in our tracks.  That raises the question for us whether apart from ignorance, aversion, and attachment there might be a better way.  That at least opens the possibility that unsatisfactoriness could come to an end.  It suggests that our “bad-empty ride through samsara” could issue onto a smooth or at least a much smoother path if we could stop our clinging and our pushing away.  And here we sit staring at another question.

How?  How could we possibly see the end of either attachment or aversion?  How could we stop either craving or despising?  Upon what basis would we make life choices and what would we live for if not to acquire that which we want and to avoid that which we dislike?  What, if not this, is truly worth living for?  Would our lives not be groundless without it?  In short form, Buddha answered this question with the last words he ever spoke:

All composite things are perishable. Strive for your own liberation with diligence.

Fortunately, he also left us his Fourth Noble Truth.  This is the Noble Eightfold Path.  It is a path that leads to the cessation of suffering.  It is a path that opens the mind to its true nature beyond worldly things, to its own liberation, and to its illuminated compassionate purpose while still embodied here on Earth.  On the Noble Eightfold Path the incompleteness of everything becomes a more and more luminous invitation to watch the sun rise upon a magical and mysterious world.  No longer a world warped and twisted by the illusions of a mind bent on fulfillment, it reemerges as something graceful and unexpected.

 

Notes:

1.Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (2013), p. 289.

2.From Stop this World by Mose Allison, released 1994 on the album Allison Wonderland: Anthology.  Also released by Diana Krall in 2004 on the album The Girl in the Other Room.