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12. Buddhism: getting away from suffering

In brief

In the following three chapters we will move from the philosophical traditions of Europe to those of India and beyond, in particular to the traditions of Buddhism. Buddhism has always concerned itself with both happiness and suffering. But what does this ancient tradition have to say to us today?

A method for happiness?

In the contemporary literature of happiness, one tradition seems to stand out more than all the others, and that’s Buddhism. It has become almost a truism that the teachings and practices associated with Buddhism might be capable of revolutionizing our approach to happiness; and it’s often stated that the contemporary science of happiness is not so much discovering how happiness happens but instead rediscovering what was already well known in the traditions of Buddhism. No self-respecting book on happiness, it seems, is complete without a reference to the Buddha.

So what can Buddhism tell us about happiness? What kind of idea of happiness is there in the Buddhist tradition? And, more importantly perhaps, what, if anything, can the methods of Buddhism do to help us cultivate happiness?

Who was the Buddha?

To understand Buddhism, we need to go back to the figure of the Buddha. Most books about Buddhism tell how the Buddha was born Siddhārtha Gautama, the son of King Śuddhodana and Queen Māyādevī, in the Śākyan kingdom just to the south of the Himalayas. After his birth, a holy man predicted that the boy would either become a great saint or a great king; and because Śuddhodana wanted an heir for himself, he became determined that Siddhārtha should not leave home in search of sainthood. As a result he provided the boy with every pleasure imaginable. Certain Buddhist texts take delight in describing the intense sensual pleasures to which Siddhārtha was exposed. Yet one day, the prince left the palace and travelled through the streets of the city, and there he saw a sick man, an old man and a corpse. He was plunged into anguish, an anguish that led to his departure from his life of luxury and a relentless quest for truth. Eventually, sitting underneath a tree in a place now known as Bodh Gaya, in present-day Bihar, India, he experienced an awakening (the Indian term bodhi is somewhat better translated as ‘awakening’ than ‘enlightenment’), which liberated him once and for all from the sufferings of the world. The remainder of his life was spent teaching the ‘four noble truths’: the truth of suffering, the truth of suffering’s causes, the truth that there is an end to suffering, and the truth of the path that leads away from suffering.

So much for the legend. More sober historical research suggests that much of this is probably later invention. So what do we know about the historical Buddha?

The Buddha is the title given to Siddhārtha Gautama, who lived some time around the fifth century BCE, although the exact dates are in dispute. He was from a small republic to the south of the Himalayas. At this time in India, there was a strong tradition of wandering philosophers who would leave their homes and embark on an extraordinary range of experiments in living. Siddhārtha joined their number, according to one of the earliest accounts, while he was ‘still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessings of youth in the first stage of life’. After an experience that he referred to as his awakening, he founded a community of followers who practised and passed on his teachings. He died, according to some accounts, in his eighties, of food poisoning.

In addition to this somewhat skeletal biography, we also know a great deal about the Buddha’s teachings, or at least about the teachings that were codified by his followers in the years following his death. And it’s these teachings that have drawn the attention of modern-day happiness researchers.

The problem of suffering, or, happiness by the back door

Although Buddhism does sometimes talk in positive terms about happiness, more often it can be found talking about the path away from that which impedes our happiness, in other words the path that leads away from suffering. Suffering, indeed, is the central problem in Buddhism; and if we’re to understand what Buddhism has to say about happiness, then we need to know a bit more about what’s meant by suffering in the traditions of Buddhism.

The term for ‘suffering’ in the Pāli language of the earliest Buddhist texts is dukkha. However, the Pāli term has slightly broader meaning than the English ‘suffering’. So extreme physical pain may entail dukkha, but so may nagging anxiety brought on by a deadline, or the frustration of forgetting where you’ve left your keys.

Dukkha or ‘suffering’ in Buddhism doesn’t just mean pain. Instead it has a much wider reference, encompassing various forms of pain, suffering, dissatisfaction, disquiet, disappointment and discontent.

Dukkha in Buddhism isn’t really a matter of unpleasant feelings. In Buddhist psychology it’s recognized that there are both pleasant and unpleasant feelings, as well as those that are neither strongly pleasant nor unpleasant. It’s also recognized that the coming and going of these feelings is often largely outside our present control, and is the result of previous conditions, not all of which are (or ever were, perhaps) within our power. If we’re bitten by a snake, for example, there will be intensely unpleasant feelings associated with the bite. If we eat a delicious meal, we may have intensely pleasant feelings associated with the meal. The pleasure and pain arise out of the conditions that have gone before.

So where does dukkha or suffering come in? Suffering comes in when we get involved in either holding on to pleasant feelings or pushing away unpleasant feelings. Have a look at the following case study.

Jessica was always interested in Buddhism, and so was excited when she got the chance to travel to Thailand and to live alone in a forest retreat, far from the nearest hospital. Unfortunately, while she was meditating one day, she was bitten on the leg by a centipede. The pain was excruciating. Jessica lay on her bed, sweating with fever and waiting for the pain to pass. ‘Why me?’ she thought. ‘It’s so unfair! Why did I come to Thailand? It was a stupid thing to do! I’m an idiot.’ Then a dark intention formed in her mind. ‘Death to all centipedes!’ she muttered feverishly.

But then she realized: on the one hand there was the physical sensation, that strange, intense burning feeling in her calf; but beyond the physical sensations, there was a whole bundle of suffering caused by self-recrimination, by centipede-cursing, by fear, and by attempting to push away the raw fact of pain. Jessica took a deep breath and she started, very carefully, to take her attention to the burning pain in her leg. Her mind become more settled. The hours passed …

What’s going on in this story? One way of looking at it is this: if you’re bitten by a centipede, you can do nothing about the physical sensations themselves. They’re simply a part of the fact of having a body. But in the Buddhist view the suffering (which isn’t the same as the raw painfulness) lies not in the physical sensations so much as in the mental disquiet that you experience in relation to these sensations. In early Buddhism, in particular, the Buddha often suggests paying attention to the experience of bodily sensations while undercutting the mental commentary. As one text puts it, we should train ourselves so that ‘in the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized will be merely what is cognized’ – a form of training that might also be approved of by the Stoics over in Greece and Rome.

But it’s not only unpleasant sensation that risks causing suffering. So does pleasant sensation. In this case we don’t push away sensation but try to keep hold of it. But once again, it’s our desire to hold on that causes us misery. Think of the pleasure we get out of being on holiday, and the way that this pleasure can be undermined by the dark cloud of our knowledge of our impending return and the fact that we want to hold on to this blissful state of freedom from responsibility.

Four truths

This brings us to the so-called ‘four noble truths’ that are so central to Buddhist doctrine. What are these truths? And in what sense, if any, are they ‘truths’? Sometimes the four noble truths are expressed like this:

Life is bound up with, or entails, suffering or disquiet;
The root cause of this suffering is craving;
There is an end of suffering which is awakening;
Buddhism provides us with the path to awakening.

But in the same way that arguments about God are convincing only to the converted, this view of suffering is perhaps unpersuasive to any but the most hard-bitten of Buddhists.

One arguably more useful way of thinking about these four ‘truths’ is in the fashion recommended by scholars in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, who, instead of seeing these four things as abiding philosophical truths about the world in general, claim that they can be used as a way of classifying phenomena. The distinction may seem subtle, but it’s a useful one. If we look at the four truths like this, then, when we come across something within our experience, it’s a matter of asking ourselves the following questions:

Is this a ‘suffering’?
Is this a cause of suffering?
Is this the cessation of suffering?
Is this a way towards the cessation of suffering?

To explore this approach to experience, try the following exercise. At the end of the day, think about your experiences over the past few hours. Can you classify them as dukkha, causes of dukkha, cessations of dukkha, and ways towards the cessation of dukkha? Use the following table if it helps. It might be that columns 1 and 3 deal more closely with experience and columns 2 and 4 deal more closely with actions or activities.

1. Dukkha	2. Causes	3. Cessations	4. Ways towards cessation

Now ask yourself the following questions:

Does this classification make sense of your experience and activities in any meaningful way?
Does it help you find ways to deal with the problem of dukkha (suffering, discontent or disquiet)?
What are the implications of this approach for how we think about happiness?

But what about happiness?

It can often seem that Buddhism is much more directly concerned with suffering than with happiness; but we should remember that dukkha has an opposite: sukha.

The word sukha is often encountered in the Buddhist texts as a part of the compound hita-sukha, meaning well-being and happiness. The early Buddhist texts, at least, recognize that there’s a kind of well-being that we can attain here in the world, which is why the often-repeated claim that ‘Buddhism says that life is suffering’ is mistaken. However, one of the insights of the Buddhist tradition is that if we fail to take account of suffering, then we’re not going to attain to well-being.

We often imagine that suffering and well-being are opposite poles, and that we have to turn away from the former to attain the latter. What the traditions of Buddhism ask of us is that instead of attempting to simply suppress suffering, or trying to forget it, we should look as closely as we can at the suffering that we experience, and inquire about its origins and how we might best respond to it. The really urgent issue is not finding happiness, but removing the immediate causes of suffering. And if we do this, then we might find that it’s to our benefit and our happiness.

This is an exercise in paying attention to the push-and-pull that, according to Buddhism, tends to characterize our experience.

Firstly, set aside a morning or a whole day and, during the course of this day, pay particular attention to painful and pleasant sensations. Notice how you naturally want to keep hold of pleasant sensations, and how you naturally want to push away painful sensations. See if you can distinguish between the sensation itself, and the push-and-pull response.

Once you’ve become good at making this distinction (if there is such a distinction), see if you can keep your attention on just the sensations rather than the responses.

And when you’ve done this, consider the questions below.

Does it make sense to distinguish between raw sensation and the various responses we might have to these sensations?
On the basis of your experience, do you think there’s any truth to the claim that this push-and-pull is the cause of suffering?
Imagine if you could just experience the sensations without this kind of response (like Jessica just experiencing the raw sensations of pain). Do you think this is possible? And would this, as the Buddhists claim, be a kind of freedom from suffering?

So far, we’ve looked in general terms at the approach to happiness and suffering in the traditions of Buddhism; but one thing that makes Buddhism particularly interesting to researchers today is that it provides a method for responding to the dukkha that seems inherent in life; and that method is meditation. This, then, will be the subject of the next chapter.