Noble Truths (1): Buddha’s Diagn

A Few Words Forward

Before heading to the theme, I want to address the issue of Buddhist languages in the first place for clear annotations of terms in later writings.

According to Rupert Gethin’s book Foundations of Buddhism, before Sanskrit (梵文) became the canonical language of Buddhism, the original language of Buddhist thoughts were in a dialect similar to Pali (巴利语), which is the canonical language of the Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, and as Buddhism flourished in China, Chinese and Tibetan became the major dominant language in their own right. In my later writings, I will annotate the encountered terms in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Pali. For instance, “Suffering”(苦, Duhkha/Dukkha). In the parentheses“苦”, “Duhkha”, “Dukkha” are respectively in Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, which all share the same meaning “Suffering” in English.

Early Buddha’s Teachings

The term “Buddhism” refers to a vast and complex religious and philosophical tradition. Vary as traditions and schools of living Buddhism may, these traditions all share some fundamental ideas and practices that have a common Indian heritage. It seems worthwhile examining those ideas and practices and my writings endeavour to go through these foundations in plain English. I am to start with the very orientation of the Buddha’s teachings—the Four Noble Truths(四圣谛): the truth of suffering, the truth of its cause, the truth of its cessation, and the truth of the path leading to its cessation.

In fact, we don’t know for sure what Buddha had taught. From early sūtras(经) and Buddhist scriptures, we infer the contents of the Buddha’s teachings. Buddha’s teachings start with an orientation toward something beyond this world. A truth transcends this ordinary world of experience. This philosophical view shares a great deal of similarities with Taoism and that is also one of the reasons why Taoism has a deep connection with Eastern tradition of Buddhism (general outlook: Mahāyāna or “Great Vehicle”, 大乘) accepted by China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

In this essay, I will discuss the first two truths—the truth of suffering and the truth of its cause. Together, these two combine to be the Buddha’s diagnosis of human predicament: Buddha first discovered the universal human problem that is “Suffering”(苦, Duhkha/Dukkha), then the Buddha found its very cause that is “Thirst ”(渴爱, trsnā/tanhā).

The First Noble Truth: Life is Duhkha

In the night of Buddha’s Awakening, Buddha fathomed out the truth transcending the conventional world and said that Life is Duhkha, which is the content of the first Noble Truth. This scene was quite like the scene in the movie The Matrix, where Neo rises from the coffin-like pod seeing the reality himself. The Truth itself is simple, its underlying meaning, however, is quite extensive.

There is an apt and clear interpretation of the first truth in plain English from Foundations of Buddhism:

“It (The first Noble Truth) addresses a basic fact of existence: sooner or later, in some form or another, beings are confronted by and have to deal with duhkha…even with everything one could possibly wish for, he had not found true happiness as long as he and those dearest to him were prey to disease, old age and death. This is the actuality of duhkha.”

It is tempting to think that Buddha has a philosophical worldview which is pessimistic and world-denying (the one like Arthur Schopenhauer), but that is not what Buddha meant. Buddha merely stated a fact—the reality of duhkha does exist—that all beings cannot deny and from a Buddhist perspective, those who judge the first Noble Truth as pessimistic and world-denying might reflect a refusal to accept the reality of duhkha.

Well, that’s fine, you may wonder, life is duhkha or suffering, but why don’t I always suffer or feel the discomfort? Scarcely do people living a normal life consider as suffering most of life experiences. It is because the English word “Suffering” does not catch the whole meaning of the Sanskrit word “Duhkha” which suggests the underlying meaning close to the word “Unsatisfactoriness”. You may not suffer a lot, whereas you have indeed been in a state of unsatisfactoriness for countless times: when pleasure brought by the need-gratifying things soon fades away, you are unsatisfied; when things or people you long for don’t bring you that much of pleasure, or love as you expected, you are unsatisfied; when life conditions change and the world leaves us nothing but only uncertainty, you are unsatisfied. That is natural to you, me, and all other people, for the simple fact we often overlook—we are only human, the multitude (凡夫, puthujjanas). We fail to see everything is in constant flux, or in Buddhist term, everything is “Impermanent” (无常, anitya/anicca).

The Second Noble Truth: The Cause of Duhkha

The second Noble Truth, to put it nice and simple, is thirst is the cause of duhkha. The word “thirst” is the literal English translation of the word “trsnā” or “tanhā” that is often understood as “craving” in Buddhist scripture. All beings, deep in their minds, have the unquenchable thirst which can not be satisfied. We crave things that bring us sensual pleasure, fame, or even immortality; we also crave to be no one—we turn back on our ambition, wish we had never been born, and perhaps at last take our own lives.

 “Attachment”(执取, upādāna) grows in our mind under the nurture of thirst. According to Buddha’s teachings, it is not the external objects themselves we are to blame. Rather, the rub is the attachment to those things, which leads ultimately to duhkha: we cling to those things, strive to get hold of them and call them “our own”. However, everything is impermanent—those things and our feelings towards them are both constantly changing, never can they be “our own”. To the things that are positive good, such as not harming other people, being kind to others, or even Buddha’s practice, we should not get attached. Well, if that is the case, how could we do the good? From Buddhist perspective, we’d better do the good under the condition of rooting out any motivation of doing the bad. This may sound like a semantic game designed by Buddha, this unique point of view from Buddhism, however, is getting an increasing number of supporting evidences in modern psychology, which will be covered later.

Thus far, I have discussed “craving” and “attachment”, but how about “aversion”? It is not hard for us to consider aversion as unfulfilled craving and frustrated attachment. Buddhism taking a step further, claims that even in the absence of attachment and aversion, we view the world through a mind that is fundamentally unclear, which most of time leaves us in duhkha. This claim will be discussed further in the part of psychology writing.