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RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

During the late 1980s visitors to New York City’s Times Square were surprised and puzzled to observe, among all the flashing neon lights, the enormous words PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, center stage on the Spectacolor marquee above them. When artist Jenny Holzer installed this slogan—one of her personal “truisms,” about how advertising elicits desire for things we do not need and may not even want—intentionally or not she was making a compelling comment on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and the barrier to happiness that each of us encounters.

TEACHINGS

The first step of the Eightfold Path—right understanding, also called right view—like many spiritual conditions, emerged from the personal experiences of one individual, in this case the man we know as the Buddha (“Awakened One”). The historical Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Sakya clan ( Shakyamuni Buddha), in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal in the sixth century B.C.E. Before his birth, a seer had foretold that the child would grow up to be either a great ruler or a great holy man, and his father did everything possible to ensure that Siddhartha would actualize the first possibility rather than the second and succeed him as the chief of the clan. Siddhartha was exposed to continuous sense pleasures while being shielded from anything unpleasant that might divert him from the course his father had set for him. Nevertheless, as an adult, on each of four outings from the palace, Siddhartha had an experience that stunned him. He encountered, for the first time in his life, a very sick person, a very old person, mourners around a person who had died, and an ascetic holy man, a sadhu. Each time, Siddhartha asked his charioteer what he was seeing, and he was shocked to learn that illness, old age, and death are inescapably part of the human condition—including his own—and that there are spiritual seekers questioning just what it means to be born into this human body and to have to endure such suffering.

At the age of twenty-nine, Siddhartha renounced his lavish life, left his family, and sought the meaning of human life among the greatest teachers of northern India as an ascetic who sometimes, it is said, ate only one grain of rice a day. His quest and his subsequent teachings were rooted in their yogic traditions, in which individuals renounced life as householders in order to seek spiritual truth. After six years he realized that he could no more find spiritual answers by living a life of stark deprivation than through princely self-indulgence, and he embraced what has come to be known as the Middle Way between such extremes. On the night of the full moon in May on his thirty-fifth birthday, Siddhartha sat beneath a bodhi (fig) tree near Bodhgaya, in northern India, and vowed not to get up until he had achieved full enlightenment. Over the course of that night, he experienced all the temptations to which the mind is vulnerable, saw human suffering over many lifetimes, and came to understand the Four Noble Truths as well as the law of karma (causality), the impermanence of all conditioned things, and the absence of an autonomous and permanent self.

Soon after his enlightenment, he became known as the Buddha. He sought out five ascetics with whom he had once practiced and at Sarnath (Benares), also in northern India, he gave them his first discourse, on the Four Noble Truths. For the next forty-five years, as he himself proclaimed, he taught one thing and one thing only: dukkha (“suffering”) and the end of dukkha. Within these teachings, the first step of the Eightfold Path— right understanding—specifically refers to “perfect” understanding of the Four Noble Truths, as well as understanding of the laws of impermanence and nonself and of karma. These teachings are challenging—and I seriously considered starting this book with other steps on the path. I stuck with the traditional sequence, however, because only after patient reflection on these teachings can we comprehend and appreciate the interrelationship of everything else that follows.

The Four Noble Truths

In his first teaching, the Buddha introduced the ideas that laid the foundation for all of his teachings: the truths of suffering, of the origin of suffering, of the cessation of suffering, and of the way leading to the cessation of suffering. His senior disciple Sariputta described the all-inclusive nature of that discourse this way: “Friends, just as the footprint of any living being that walks can be placed within an elephant’s footprint, and so the elephant’s footprint is declared the chief of them because of its great size; so too, all wholesome states can be included in the Four Noble Truths” (MN 28.2).

An important aspect of the Buddha’s teaching is its extreme practicality. Very often he spoke in metaphors that his followers would be familiar with, such as tending water buffaloes or building a fire. He did not set out to establish a convoluted philosophy. Rather, the elegance of his teachings lies in their simplicity. It is as if he always anticipated the question “But what does this have to do with me?”—which is the theme underlying the “In Practice” sections of each chapter. He always encouraged his disciples not to accept his teachings on blind faith but to try them out for themselves. Although he is generally depicted as a teacher, the Buddha also repeatedly described himself using the metaphor of a physician. And certainly this metaphor holds true for the Four Noble Truths: He diagnosed the “spiritual illness” of all sentient beings in the First Noble Truth, described its causes and curability in the Second and Third Noble Truths, and prescribed its cure in the Fourth.

Just as a physician explains to a patient what his or her role in the healing process must be, so too did the Buddha, in the Vinaya (the third section of the Pali canon, comprising guidelines compiled for monks and nuns), outline specific tasks for those following his diagnosis and cure:

For suffering, our undertaking is to understand it.

For suffering’s origin, our undertaking is to get rid of it.

For the cessation of suffering, our undertaking is to make it happen.

For the (Eightfold) path leading to the cessation of suffering, our undertaking is to follow it.

The importance of the Four Noble Truths to the overall teachings of the Buddha cannot be overemphasized. In many discourses he stressed that anyone who fully comprehends them has achieved right understanding and has arrived at the true Dharma (MN 9.14).

The First Noble Truth

Before we explore the First Noble Truth, it is imperative that we look at the word used in the Buddha’s discourses for “suffering”: dukkha (in Pali; duhkha in Sanskrit). Although dukkha is usually translated as “suffering,” there is no term in English that adequately captures all its connotations. It can be a quality of mental or physical dis-ease, dissatisfaction, and pain in ourselves or in our environment. One contemporary scholar and teacher, Theravada monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu, has translated dukkha as “stress.” It has nothing to do with how much or how little we have materially or what our age, ethnic group, or gender is. Physically, dukkha can be as severe as a life-threatening injury in an accident or as innocuous as a paper cut. Emotionally, it can be the overwhelming grief that arises upon the death of a loved one or, as Zen teacher Enkyo O’Hara has noted, the annoyance one feels when trying to push a thunking supermarket cart with a damaged wheel. In The Four Noble Truths, the Dalai Lama describes dukkha as referring “generally to our state of existence as conditioned by karma, delusions, and afflictive emotions.”

The Buddha acknowledged that not all of life is suffering, and in the First Noble Truth, he was quite specific about what dukkha is:

Birth is suffering; ageing is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; not to obtain what one wants is suffering; in short, the five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering. This is called suffering. (MN 9.15)

The five aggregates, or skandhas (in Sanskrit; khandhas in Pali), make up the Buddha’s composite description of personality and recur in many of his teachings. They are:

Material form: our physical body and sense faculties, and all material objects in the external world

Feeling: the affective feelings of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral

Perception: discerning the qualities of things, including recognition and memory

Mental formations: all wholesome and unwholesome mental factors such as compassion, volition, and attachment

Consciousness: awareness through contact between an “object” and its corresponding organ, or sense door (for example, sound—ear; light—eye)

When we contemplate the Second and Third Noble Truths, we find that the aggregates are sometimes considered the “aggregates of attachment” because they are the gateways of the attachment that causes dukkha. In some teachings, for this reason, the Buddha cited mental formations that we generally think of as positive— joy and love, for example—as potential sources of dukkha.

The Second and Third Noble Truths

The Second Noble Truth states quite simply that the origin of suffering is craving (MN 9.16). The Third Noble Truth explains that the cessation of suffering is letting go of and rejecting that same craving (MN 9.17).

It is important to understanding the Second and Third Noble Truths that we consider the Buddha’s explanation of how craving itself is generated and how it can be ended, a process known as the law of dependent origination (or dependent coarising or conditional arising). In several discourses (for example, MN 38) dependent origination is explained as a simple proposition:

When this exists, that exists.
When this arises, that arises.

 

Or, conversely:

When this does not exist, that does not exist.
When this ceases, that ceases.

 

In other teachings the Buddha articulated the process in a much more detailed manner, called the twelve links of dependent origination, the underlying explanation of the Second Noble Truth. Summarizing these links, the Dalai Lama, in The Four Noble Truths, says, “All conditioned things and events in the universe come into being only as a result of the interaction of various causes and conditions.” The Buddha described how these causes and conditions manifested in the twelve links over three lifetimes, but the principles can be seen at work in much shorter time spans, even moments, in our everyday life. Each link is conditional, or dependent, upon the one preceding it. The traditional sequence of the twelve links, with annotations based on John Snelling’s analysis in The Elements of Buddhism, is:

Ignorance—a willful blindness that leads to:

Volitional action, or mental formations—which generate:

Consciousness—which requires:

Mentality-materiality, or name and form—a vehicle or body to carry consciousness through the world, which has:

Six sense bases, or six sense organs—“windows and doors” that stimuli cause to experience:

Contact, or sense impressions—which generate:

Feelings (of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral)—which cause:

Craving, or desire—a kind of intoxicant that leads to blind:

Clinging, or attachment—that triggers:

Becoming (being)—which leads to:

Birth (rebirth)—which produces:

Dukkha: “[W]ith birth as condition, ageing and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair come to be. Such is the origin of this whole mass of suffering” (MN 38.17).

When this scheme is applied to multiple lifetimes, the Buddha said that the first two links—ignorance and volitional action—are conditioned by past life. In this life each day we may momentarily experience parts of the sequence, as when an advertisement dares us to eat just one potato chip, assuming that the feeling taste will be so pleasant that we will desire more and end up attached and eat the whole bag of chips.

Right understanding of the law of dependent origination underlying the Second and Third Noble Truths thus gives us the knowledge we need to let go of craving and clinging and therefore the suffering that arises from them.

In a telling comment in his excellent book What the Buddha Taught, Walpola Rahula points out:

[T]he cause, the germ, the arising of dukkha is within dukkha itself, and not outside; and we must equally well remember that the cause, the germ, of the cessation of dukkha, of the destruction of dukkha, is also within dukkha itself, and not outside. This is what is meant by the well-known formula often found in original Pali texts: . . . “Whatever is of the nature of arising, all that is of the nature of cessation.”

To summarize: Reading the twelve links in sequence from 1 to 12 explains how suffering arises—each link is necessary for the next one to manifest. Reading them in reverse from 12 to 1 lays out how suffering ceases—each link “extinguished” eliminates the one that precedes it. To simplify for our purposes (which we will explore in the “In Practice” section starting on page 20), if we can break the cycle by “extinguishing” feeling (7), craving (8), or clinging (9) through eliminating ignorance (1) with right understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering. Using our simplified formula: When craving (or clinging or feeling or ignorance) ceases, then suffering ceases. With right understanding, the dependent origination cycle can be broken, and we can be liberated from dukkha through practicing the Eightfold Path of the Fourth Noble Truth. The teaching is simple but not at all easy.

The Fourth Noble Truth

After diagnosing our “spiritual illness” and describing its origins, the Buddha prescribed its cure in the Fourth Noble Truth:

And what is the way leading to the cessation of suffering? It is just this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view [understanding], right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. (MN 9.18)

This chapter explores right understanding; we shall look into the other steps on the Eightfold Path in the chapters that follow. It is somewhat misleading, however, to refer to steps on a path, as if we were walking on an inflexibly sequential one-lane, one-way highway. In It’s Easier Than You Think, Sylvia Boorstein made an apt suggestion:

The main map the Buddha offered for the trip to happiness and contentment is called the Eightfold Path, but I have often thought it should be called the Eightfold Circle. A path goes from here to there, and the nearer you are to there, the farther you are from here. A path is progressive . . . on a genuine path you would need to start at the beginning and proceed in a linear way until the end. With a circle, you can join in anywhere, and it’s the same circle.

To fully appreciate the other steps on the Eightfold Path, we need to first look at two other aspects of right understanding: impermanence, including emptiness and nonself; and karma.

Impermanence, Emptiness, and Nonself

When we look at the question of impermanence—whether in terms of the infinitely large universe or the smallest submicroscopic particle yet discovered—the inescapable conclusion is that everything that exists is in a perpetual state of change. Everything is impermanent. Period. This universal characteristic of impermanence (anicca in Pali; anitya in Sanskrit) explains why the root cause of all dukkha is craving: Everything that we crave is impermanent and will pass away. And so will “we.” Korean Zen master Seung Sahn emphasizes this in The Compassion of Zen when he writes: “ ‘Insight into impermanence’ is the Buddha’s most basic teaching. He taught this first because impermanence is the basis of every kind of suffering that we experience.”

It was Siddhartha’s comprehension of our human impermanence—of aging, illness, and death—that led him to leave the palace on his spiritual quest. We can understand human change as it relates to our physical bodies: Our fingernails and hair grow, we get wrinkled skin and nearsightedness as we age, and we even know (intellectually, at least) that we will someday die. But we nevertheless cling to the idea that there is something about us, perhaps a soul or self, that is permanent, autonomous, and unchanging. When we revisit the five aggregates that the Buddha described as making up human beings, however, we can find absolutely nothing in them that is autonomous and permanent. As Zen priest Jisho Warner has described it:

Impermanence is a great river of phenomena, of beings, things, and events, coming to be and passing away in dependence on each other. This natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. We are an endless moving stream in an endless moving stream.

We are a convergence of material form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness at any given moment. John Snelling compares our makeup of aggregates to that of an automobile, which is also made up of parts: If you dismantle it, you have spare parts you can point to and name but you do not have a car. Joseph Goldstein often uses the metaphor of the Big Dipper—a concept human beings have imposed on the sky, just as “Joseph” is a concept imposed on him. Neither exists as a permanent, separate entity. For newcomers to Buddhism, the nonexistence of a separate self is usually the most challenging idea encountered. But take a few quiet moments, and try to find a separate, permanent “self.” Is it your body? What you hear or see? What you think? What or how you feel? What you are aware of ? Can you point to something else that is your “self”?

Most of us end up saying, “But I feel like there’s a me.” There is, relatively speaking, but feelings are not permanent and absolute, and neither are our bodies, perceptions, or thoughts in that convergence called “self.” In the next moment, emotionally and physically, we will have changed. Seung Sahn likes to describe the unreality of the statement “Ten years later I went to Paris,” given the fact that every seven years every cell in our bodies is replaced and not one cell of the I who goes to Paris existed in the I who went there ten years before. Similarly, we can get an excellent sense of impermanence by contemplating what we were like in the past—physically, mentally, and spiritually.

The Buddha repeatedly taught that the delusion of a permanent self is what so frequently elicits our suffering, and ignorance of the reality of nonself (anatta in Pali; anatman in Sanskrit) is the heart of the teachings on the twelve links of dependent origination and thus right understanding. Mahayana Buddhist teachers stress emptiness (of a separate, autonomous, unchanging self ), or shunyata (in Sanskrit; sunnata in Pali), as the central teaching of Buddhism. A popular old story about the necessity of emptiness tells of an encounter between a Japanese master named Nan-in and a rather pompous professor who was visiting him. At one point Nan-in served tea; he filled the professor’s cup but continued to pour as it overflowed. The astonished professor sputtered a question about what was happening, and Nan-in replied, “You, like this cup, are filled with your own opinions. How can I show you Zen until you empty your cup, your mind?” The Buddha used the example of the meditation hall to teach that an entity is always empty of something: The meditation hall was empty of monks (MN 121); we—and all other things—are empty of a separate self.

Our minds create dualities such as Self and Other. When we understand that We and They are both empty, we can break down such separation, can truly appreciate the interconnection of all living beings, and thus can dedicate ourselves to bodhichitta (Sanskrit for “awakened mind”)—to seeking enlightenment not just for ourselves but for the benefit of all beings. If there were a separate and permanent self, such spiritual growth would be impossible. But spiritual growth is possible through our understanding of the Four Noble Truths, impermanence, and karma.

Karma

The term karma has come into popular usage to mean some sort of unavoidable destiny, and we often hear it used this way, in casual comments and even in advertising, in statements such as “It’s his karma to always have a girlfriend who hurts him,” or “It’s your karma to take an idyllic vacation in Hawaii.” The meaning in Buddhism is quite different. The Sanskrit term karma (kamma in Pali) means “action” or “deed”—not the fruit of an action. Karma is what attaches one link of dependent origination to the next. Karma is affected by both past and present factors. Karma can be individual, family, or even national.

Although all actions produce effects, occurrences in the natural, nonhuman world are not karma because the Buddha defined karma as volitional action through our body, speech, or mind. We thus are affected by many nonkarmic occurrences, such as weather and illness. “Good karma” is a volitional action that has “good” results, and “bad karma” is a volitional action that has “bad” results. The so-called law of karma states that there is always a cause-andeffect relationship between intentional actions or thoughts and their outcomes. (The lawful relationship between karmic cause and effect through our thoughts will be explored in Chapter 2.)

Because karma always bears fruit, Insight Meditation teacher Ruth Denison has quipped, “Karma means you don’t get away with nothing.” The only question is when the effects will occur, for conditions must be right for karma to manifest. The differences in the time needed for a cause to manifest can be illustrated by two metaphors from nonvolitional, nonkarmic nature. If we eat spoiled seafood, we’ll probably throw up momentarily. In contrast, Denison’s lineage heir, teacher Arinna Weisman, describes how the seeds of a redwood tree may lie dormant for hundreds of years until a forest fire’s intense heat creates the conditions for the seeds to develop. The Buddha said that karma carries over from lifetime to lifetime and that a major motivation for our spiritual quest is to break this cycle, but let’s see how right understanding of his basic teachings may play out in this life each day.

IN PRACTICE

When I was about three years old, my mother saw me sitting in the garden, talking into a daffodil. I guess the flower looked to me like the mouthpiece of the kind of wall telephones used back then. As she approached me, she could hear that I was whispering. “What are you doing, dear?” she asked. “Telling God my secrets,” I answered. Today I cannot even imagine what a three-year-old thinks secrets are, much less what God is. But somehow I suspect that I knew some things then that I did not know when I graduated from college: I knew how to take delight in what was around me—to wonder at stars, to laugh at robins, to play with mud, and to talk into flowers.

As a young adult, I still enjoyed the natural beauty of my surroundings, the stimulation of seeing beautiful objects, the challenge of a particularly provocative book. But added into the mix during the years since my conversation with daffodils was increasingly insistent desire: I want . . . the right job, the right life partner, and—as my desires were literally conditioned by the messages around me—the right car, the right clothes, the right figure, even the right deodorant. Just like all the people I knew. Enter dukkha.

It took me quite a few years to see (1) that I sought comfort—reprieve from suffering (anxiety, insecurity, low self-esteem)—in my Things and (2) that my desires, by definition, were for Things I did not have. These two factors conditioned and thus determined virtually all the choices I was making in life.

Dukkha: Pain Is Inevitable, but Suffering Is Optional

I have a friend who hates change so much, she claims it makes her angry that there are different days of the week. She talks a lot about how agonizing change is. The more I have listened to her, the more I have come to understand a deeper truth: Change itself is inevitable, but fighting it is excruciating, is pure dukkha. In the collection of verses by the Buddha known as the Dhammapada, we find the statement that “our life is the creation of our mind.” Certainly our dukkha is. In It’s Easier Than You Think, Sylvia Boorstein points out our contribution to it and makes a useful distinction relative to changes and the dukkha in our everyday lives:

[T]here’s a big difference between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable; lives come with pain. Suffering is not inevitable. If suffering is what happens when we struggle with our experience because of our inability to accept it, then suffering is an optional extra.

This is not a new idea. The Buddha distinguished between pain— the unavoidable realities of old age, illness, and death—and suffering—essentially greed for things to be different from what they are and the failure to recognize impermanence. Within a generally happy life, we cannot avoid the pain of losses, but we can, if we are mindful, eliminate a great deal of “optional” suffering. How do we cause ourselves this suffering? First, we generate dukkha by clinging and craving—deciding that we must get and keep something we do not have in order to be happy—or by the other side of the craving coin, aversion, pushing away unpleasant experience or getting rid of something we do have but do not want. Both craving and aversion are tied to the aggregate of feeling, meaning, in the Buddhist context, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. As we saw with the twelve links of dependent origination, when we experience something as pleasant, we crave, we cling, we become attached. Conversely, when it feels unpleasant, we try to push it away. In this case, something that is painful also creates great suffering, as Boorstein distinguishes the two. A second way we create a great deal of dukkha is the stories we tell ourselves about our reality. We’ll look first at attachment, then at storytelling.

Wanting—but Not Grasping—What We Have

People who lived during the latter half of the twentieth century existed within the bubble of an ongoing paradox. Never before had material wealth and technology burgeoned as they did in the West. Transportation became faster, many infectious diseases were conquered, food production rose, manual labor decreased, leisure activities became more varied, and many people had more disposable income and more ways to spend it. So at the beginning of this new century, why are so many people unhappy? Why are so many people in prison? Why is substance abuse so widespread? Why is the divorce rate so high? Why do so many people feel that something is missing from their lives?

The answer resides within the last question. Happiness lies not in finding what is missing but in finding what is present. Happiness is being content with what we have, or at least accepting the reality of what we’ve been dealt—including material things, health, friendships—without embellishing stories. This does not mean that we cannot make plans and have preferences. But if we make happiness dependent upon getting what we want—which means something we do not have—we will probably make decisions that compromise our own values and that will bring us at best a happiness that cannot last. I repeat: that cannot last, because even when we get what we want, we cannot keep it. We just become attached to something that is inherently impermanent. As the Venerable Henepola Gunaratana (known as Bhante) summarizes it in Mindfulness in Plain English:

No matter how much you just gained, you are either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have got and scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die. In the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory.

The Buddha’s four traditional categories of attachment that especially bind us to dukkha are attachment to sense pleasures, to opinions and views, to rites and rituals, and to belief in a separate and permanent self.

Suffering that results from attachment to sense pleasures is perhaps the easiest one to see, especially if the sense pleasure is eating or drinking: Many people attached to ice cream have overeaten enough to have sugar shock in the short run and to become fat in the long run. Similarly, problem drinkers attached to repeatedly having “just one more drink” may simply be bores until they get behind the wheel of a car, engage in physical abuse, or develop fatal liver damage. But any attachment to sense pleasure can follow the same pattern: The pleasure—whether eating chocolate, swimming in the Caribbean, having good sex, or skiing down an Olympic mountain—is soon replaced by craving for more.

Joseph Goldstein has vividly shown what can happen when we do not let go of such attachments, by describing a method of trapping monkeys in Asia: A tasty morsel is put through a small hole into a coconut, which is then tied to a tree or a stake. A monkey will reach through the hole and grasp the food, but it won’t let go, at which point hunters capture and kill it. The monkey could have become free by simply opening its hand, by letting go of its “attachment.” So can we.

The news media are filled with examples of how attachment to views and opinions causes dukkha—wars, ethnic slaughter, violent elections—based on all the labels that we give ourselves (and others) and cling to. How this same dynamic can affect our personal lives was well illustrated in a story told to me by a friend:

When I was fourteen, I decided that I would never get married. I was one free guy and intended to stay that way. When I was twenty-two, I fell in love with an incredible young lady. And did she want to get married! She nagged me all the time for nearly twenty years, but I told her I was never going to get married. So she finally said, “If you do not marry me by the time I’m forty, I’m going to leave you.” You know what I said. So she turned forty, and she left. And do you know what I am? I’m a lonely fifty-four-year-old man living with a fourteen-year-old’s decision.

Attachment to ideas and opinions can always cause us dukkha, but when those opinions are unexamined, as they were in this story, we are particularly vulnerable. The Buddha warned against clinging even to his own teachings. In one discourse (MN 22) he referred to his teachings as being like a raft; after we have crossed to the other shore, we do not pick up the raft and carry it around on our backs. In another teaching he described a finger (his teachings) pointing at the moon (reality) and urged us not to just stare at the finger.

Determining when rites and rituals are objects of attachment can be subtly tricky. In some cases the rites and rituals may be an integral part of a religion we have been raised in or a spiritual practice we have adopted. Participation in such rites may not be attachment at all but rather an expression of devotion or a practice of mindfulness. But if a person cannot meditate because she has run out of a particular incense for her home altar, that is attachment. Similarly, if a person will not have coffee because he can’t find his favorite mug, or will not play a tennis match because she can’t find her lucky socks, or insists on taking the same seat at every weekly business meeting, that is attachment to a ritual.

We have already looked at attachment to the concept of a permanent, separate self in terms of whether that self exists. No matter what conclusion we reach on the question, when we act out of attachment to a self, we cause ourselves dukkha. Any time we are attached to Self, we separate ourselves from interconnection with other beings, create Other, and generate competitiveness, because we are self-satisfied about or resentful of our status relative to the Other.

Our lives are filled with events in which attachment to self can cause dukkha. One friend found out just how strong and how early the sense of self can develop when he took his seven young grandchildren to the supermarket. Each one smugly insisted that the grandfather buy him or her a different cereal from what the other children had chosen. We can also see this early development when we hear the shrill cacophony of two children shouting, “It was your fault!” “Was not—it was your fault!” when one has spilled a soda. Recent instances of road rage and even sidewalk rage have shown how their sense of self may lead some adults to run into or even over others. When we nourish this sense of self, we tend to take life personally. We feel that it happens at us. Once an acquaintance said, “The worst thing happened to me. My father had a heart attack.” What happened to her father wasn’t too great either.

A classic Zen Buddhism story puts our personalizing penchant into perspective. One evening a man decided to row out onto a broad river to enjoy the sunset. When he was in the center of the river, he looked upstream and saw another boat. “How nice,” he said to himself, “that others are out for this lovely evening.” The next time he looked, he saw that the boat was much closer; it was caught in the midriver current and was heading straight for him. He began to row furiously and to shout, “Hey, you fool! Watch where you’re going! If you don’t know how to row, you should get off the river! Hey, watch out, you idiot!” About that time the other boat collided with his. Ready to let loose another barrage of angry words, he looked into it and discovered that the boat was empty. Like himself.

Our Stories Are Stories

Mark Twain once wisely quipped, “Most of the worst things in my life never happened.” This remark highlights how we can create dukkha through the stories we tell ourselves. Sometimes it seems as if our minds barrel along with a running commentary on everything in our experience, judging ourselves, judging others, judging all the animate and inanimate objects that are present—and sometimes even absent—in our lives. One function of these stories is to create separation, and thus a sense of a self, between ourselves and others.

Consider some common experiences and the types of storytelling that might come up for us. When we expect people to call at a particular time, we may begin to imagine that they haven’t called because they do not love or like us or even because they were in an accident. If we get a headache the night before an important presentation at work, we may worry so much about not being able to sleep and feeling even worse tomorrow that we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such stories, at some point, often acquire a life of their own. We may actually take steps to act on them—but in the process generate a sense of self and an enormous amount of dukkha. Sylvia Boorstein, in Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There, describes how she interrupted such stories by using an old comedian’s line: “ ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one before....’ My stories all self-destructed. I’d heard them all before.”

The Buddha described attachment to our stories in a metaphor about being shot with two arrows. The first arrow is a “shot” that strikes us and causes us pain. The second arrow, our story, is one that we ourselves shoot into the same wound, often causing far more dukkha than the first arrow did.

Impermanence: Aging, Illness, and Death

The Buddha-to-be’s first recognition of impermanence—and suffering—occurred when he initially encountered aging, illness, and death. These hallmarks of our impermanence are unavoidable, they are not personal (they happen to everyone), and they seem to generate storytelling at an uncommonly high level.

In one of those unasked-for growth opportunities, I had the chance to learn a lot about these three aspects of impermanence. In 1998 I became ill with a debilitating disease that was life-threatening and overnight turned me into a person whose physical limitations were those of someone who is quite old. This ferociously enthusiastic mountain-climbing woman suddenly— and years later—could not even walk up her driveway without experiencing shortness of breath, fatigue, and pain.

Fortunately for me, I went into the hospital one day after returning home from end-to-end vipassana (“insight”) and metta (“lovingkindness”) retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. I made a conscious decision at the time to continue the mindfulness practices of the previous weeks in this new situation—being in the present, I had no idea how long the “situation” would last or how serious it was. Many of these practices have enabled me to get through this difficult time with remarkably little dukkha. The single most helpful tool I had was a story that Sylvia Boorstein told during a Dharma talk about karma on the last night of the metta retreat. Her story went something like this:

One morning I was walking up the path to Spirit Rock [a meditation center in Marin County, California] when I ran into a friend. “How are you?” I asked. “Fine,” she replied. A little farther on, she added, “Actually, I have this problem and that problem, and my son isn’t doing well, but I’m fine.”

After the meditation period, the students were sitting around talking, and I repeated my earlier conversation with my friend. I added, “Maybe we should have a password here—the way secret clubs have handshakes, etc.—and we should say, ‘Fine, thank you,’ as our secret code.” At that point one of the students made a remark that has gone down in the annals of Spirit Rock history: “Whenever anyone asks me how I am, I say: ‘I couldn’t be better.’ ”

[At that point Sylvia looked around the room at the metta retreatants and said:] That remark is true for every one of us at every moment of our lives. If we could be better, we would. We don’t wake up in the morning and say to ourselves, “I really feel great today. I think I’ll intentionally mess up my life.”

Everything that has ever happened had to happen for us to be where we are at any moment. We got here in a “lawful” way, based on cause and effect, on karma, and we couldn’t be better. We cannot change the past that got us here, but if we are mindful in the moment, we can, with right understanding, avoid a lot of dukkha and make decisions that can make the next moment, hour, day, week, year, or even lifetime different. With right understanding and mindfulness, we can change our karma.

As we look at aging, illness, and death, I’ll draw on some of my experiences during my illness for the kinds of everyday experiences we are all heir to.

Aging

Many of us as children had a special place—a doorway or wall— where we celebrated our growth with proudly inscribed marks. In adolescence we paraded our so-called secondary sex characteristics (our “breeding plumage”) as they appeared. Our first notable signs of aging are physical ones too, but at some point along the way our normal developmental changes become less enchanting to us. Have you ever heard anyone enthusiastically declare, “I’ve reached the point that I have to put on my glasses to eat dinner,” or, “My knees have turned to crepe paper,” or “When I had my annual physical, the doctor said I’m an inch shorter”?

The Buddha pointed to such changes specifically as the source of dukkha related to material form in the five aggregates. After describing the appearance of a beautiful woman fifteen or sixteen years old, he urged his disciples to imagine her as a very old woman:

as crooked as a roof bracket, doubled up, supported by a walking stick, tottering, frail, her youth gone, her teeth broken, grey-haired, scanty-haired, bald, wrinkled, with limbs all blotchy . . . this is a danger in the case of material form. (MN 13.19)

When we who are impermanent are attracted to other beings who also are impermanent, dukkha arises. One of the practices that the Buddha invited us to do was to visualize what inevitably happens during the aging process to ourselves and to all others. He even had his monks go to charnel grounds to contemplate the putrefaction of the body. In a less dramatic situation, we can gain invaluable experience by spending time with people who are elderly, ill, or dying.

Many of us find the cosmetic changes less troubling than the diminution of our faculties—seeing, hearing, memory—and abilities. We have “senior moments” when we cannot think of a word or name, and often we need help in doing things we used to do for ourselves. When I became ill, I needed assistance with the same tasks that many old people cannot do: cleaning my home, getting groceries, driving a car, bringing in firewood, going to see a doctor. At first this inability caused me terrible dukkha. I became angry at my body for “letting me down” each time I forgot that I couldn’t be better.

Sometimes suffering from aging comes through subtle changes in our social lives. One friend experienced enormous dukkha when she realized that men no longer looked at her when she walked down the street. In another example, an eighty-seven-year-old woman, still living with the formalities of an earlier age and surrounded by professional caregivers, made the poignant comment, “You know, one of the hardest things for me is that there’s no one left who calls me by my first name.”

It is very hard for some of us to slam into the present moment and the present reality (especially if physical limitations happen suddenly), but often the hardest thing is to ask for the help we need. Such requests are difficult because we have created a notion of a separate self, and the new situation does not fit our image of who we should be or were.

I soon realized that my suffering over my “sudden old age” was a classic example of what happens in the links of dependent origination. Aging is dependent upon birth (everything born ages), and the ignorance that produces dukkha is of impermanence and emptiness. To deal with the dukkha of impermanence and aging, we are brought right back to the “Eightfold Circle,” where we see that we couldn’t be better and need to be very gentle with ourselves.

Illness: “I Couldn’t Be Better”

No matter how healthy we are, at some point a physical illness or problem is likely to bring us dukkha. As Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has observed, when we have a toothache, we know that happiness is not having a toothache—we say, “Oh, I would be so happy if I did not have this toothache.” The same is true of all our physical problems. It is important to remember that whatever the illness is and whatever the dukkha is—whether physical pain or deep emotional suffering—it is not personal and it is not permanent. It will change. We did not tell our body to get old or sick, and we cannot tell it to get young or well. As a friend once said, “It gets better, then it gets worse, then it gets different, then it gets real.” The sooner we can get to “real,” the less dukkha we’ll have.

One of the first things we have to deal with in illness is what is real. Simply feeling sick is real, and often the treatment for an illness can add to our discomfort. The treatment for my illness, for example, has included medications that have most unpleasant side effects. (The pharmacy’s fact sheet for one drug listed cancer and blindness; for three years I was on methotrexate, which caused me unrelenting nausea; much of my medication has had to be injected.) Then we add on our unreal stories. The first step is to simply realize that this is what “sick” feels like. Related to this, I found it useful to meditate on what those sick feelings are. I discovered, for example, that what I felt as pain very often was heat and that it was not of equal intensity throughout the affected area. When I was able to directly experience what was happening in my body through right understanding and mindfulness, I did not get sucked into all the optional suffering.

During the first, prolonged hospitalization, I had some physical pain, which I dealt with through this type of meditation, but not much “suffering.” The only time in the hospital that I wallowed for any length of time in self-generated dukkha stories was the day I had to cancel a trip to Tibet, Bhutan, and Sikkim. The reality was that I was too sick to go. I was in the hospital and not likely to get out soon. But I did not leave it at that. The stories started in my head: “I’ll never get another chance to take this trip.... I’ll be too weak to ever train again for trekking in the Himalayas.... If I ever do get to Tibet, it will have changed so much that it won’t really be Tibet anymore.” I had another bout with this kind of dukkha a few evenings after I went home. In my first “outing,” a friend “walked” me and my dog out to the curb. As I was standing there, the world grew very dim. The reality was that I could not see at that moment, probably a side effect from medications. But my mind was off and running: “I’m blind from that transplant drug. How can I live blind? I can’t earn my living if I can’t see. I can’t take care of myself if I can’t see.” Suffering. Luckily, the vision problem was impermanent, came and went several times, then disappeared.

Since then, I have had practice in catching and stopping the stories more quickly. I cultivate gratitude for and pleasure in what I do have in the moment. I spend summers at a house on a river in the Adirondacks, surrounded by mountains I have loved to climb but now cannot. So in the spirit of being content with what I have, I’ve looked around to see what I can do today. Now I spend many summer days lying down next to a large lilac bush, watching the ever-changing river go by, and plucking blades of grass from the moss garden I am mindfully cultivating. I spend winters in Taos, New Mexico. Right now I cannot enjoy the winter sports that originally were such an attraction for me, so I spend time doing some new things that are special to that area—learning to drum and to speak Spanish—that I can do sitting down. And beyond the computer on which I am fortunate enough to work, I look at snow-crusted Taos Mountain. And I’m happy.

But the process of embracing what I have in the moment has not been instantaneous. Like most people experiencing illness, I have had to ask myself what is real and generate acceptance that in this moment, I couldn’t be better. I’ve had to use every tool I have (and most of them will be found in Chapters 7 and 8, on mindfulness and meditation), and I have had to leave the “second arrow” of storytelling in my quiver.

Death

Despite the fact that we are all going to die, most of us ignore that reality, through denial, perhaps, or fear. In his provocative book A Year to Live, Stephen Levine points out “how often death takes people unawares.” Our culture simply does not give us much training in how to prepare for our own death. Levine invites us to undertake an experiment: to live the next year as if it were the last year of our life and to observe what happens. Earnestly trying this experiment, some people may change jobs, some people may change spouses, and many people will dramatically change their attitudes about life. The Buddha and many teachers since have invited us to use illness and pain as opportunities to practice dying.

Given that death is inevitable and is the “trademark” of impermanence, what can we find in the Buddha’s teachings to ameliorate the suffering that arises around it? The answer lies in right understanding of the very same answers he gave to extinguishing dukkha from other sources of attachment to what is impermanent. We begin with ignorance of the nature of existence, nonself, and impermanence and the fact that we all die. The Buddha taught this difficult reality in a compassionate way in several stories, including two about grief-stricken women who were suffering from the deaths of loved ones.

In the first story Visakha’s young grandson had died, and she felt bereft because only seven grandchildren remained and she wished she had as many as there were people in her town. The Buddha gently led her through a series of questions about how many people lived in her town and how many died each day. She realized that if she had as many grandchildren as there were townspeople, she would be grieving constantly because the more attachments we have, the more dukkha we experience.

In the second story the widow Kisagotami came to the Buddha grasping the corpse of her small child—the only thing she loved that had remained to her after a life of great loss and hardship. She begged the Buddha for a “cure” that would restore her child, and the Buddha, realizing her desperate state, said that he could help her, on one condition: She was to go into the village and bring him mustard seeds from houses where no one had died. As she went from house to house, she repeatedly heard stories of grief and loss like her own. By the time she returned to the Buddha, with no mustard seeds, she understood that death— impermanence—is inescapable for all beings, and her devastating suffering was eased.

The Buddha always taught by asking that we explore solutions for ourselves. Clearly, we cannot die to learn about death, nor predict that someone close to us will die. The key is in the Dhammapada (as translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita):

288. For him who is assailed by death there is no protection by kinsmen. None there are to save him—no sons, nor father nor relatives.

289. Realizing this fact, let the wise man, restrained by morality, hasten to clear the path leading to Nibbana [nirvana].

The path leading to nirvana is the Eightfold Path. Here is where we learn to deal with the impermanence underlying all dukkha. And as the absence of a permanent, separate self is a critical aspect of such dukkha, it is especially important in dealing with death. Zen master Bernie Glassman addressed this point in a provocative statement in Tricycle magazine, in which he related it to the Buddha’s teachings on nonharming:

From the intrinsic standpoint—one of body, of Buddha-nature—non-killing means that there is nothing being born and nothing dying. The very notions of “birth” and “death” are extra. . . . The powerful irony at the heart of Zen practice is that the strongest way to follow this precept of non-killing is by killing the self !

We can learn “to kill the self” through bringing full attention to life within the context of the Eightfold Path. Rodney Smith, a former monk who is director of the Hospice of Seattle and an Insight Meditation teacher, has published a superlative book, Lessons from the Dying, in which he guides us in ways to pay attention to life and to dying. For those of us who would undertake these lessons, he shared an especially helpful insight:

Physical death is a metaphor for the death of all experience. It encompasses the ending not only of the body but of all life experience. Small deaths occur to us throughout the day. Each time our expectations are not realized, we die to our ideals. Every time we attempt to freeze a moment in time we are faced with the limits of our control and the death of our influence. Whenever we hold on to any aspect of life and it evolves into something else, we are left with our despair. Since many of our psychological difficulties come from how we handle transitions, death provides understanding into how and why we suffer. A deep and penetrating awareness of death gives direct insight into most of our problems. To investigate death, then, is to comprehend our confusion and ignorance of life.

The exploration of impermanence hurtles us into the inevitability of death. With the subject of karma, we collide with the question of how we live.

Karma: Living Between Generations

As we have noted, karma is a volitional action or thought that will (always, eventually) produce some effect. We may not know when the fruits of karma will manifest, but manifest they will. In a fascinating observation, Zen master Taisen Deshimaru describes attachment as karma that has not yet manifested. Just give it time.

In an earlier example, Arinna Weisman used the metaphor of redwood seeds for karma needing the right conditions to manifest. Thich Nhat Hanh too uses the metaphor of seeds for karma in many of his teachings: If we plant and cultivate angry seeds, he explains, we become angry people, but if we plant and nourish compassionate seeds, we become compassionate people. The direct causal relationship within this metaphor is not new. The sixth-century Chinese Ch’an master Chih-i pointed out:

Cultivation means practice, realization means attainment. Also, cultivation means practicing the cause, realization means learning the effect.

Karma is a family affair. We can learn a great deal about our parents’ karma by looking at our own lives. And we can learn a great deal about our own karma by looking at our children’s lives. How, then, can we apply right understanding in cultivating our relationship to these other generations?

Our Parents

The Buddha outlined certain duties (“noble discipline”) that we are to perform in relationship to our parents. We are to look after them in their old age, maintain the honor of the family, protect the wealth earned by our parents, and perform our parents’ funeral rites. He invited each child to think:

Having been supported by them, I will support them. I will perform their duties for them. I will keep up the family tradition. I will be worthy of my heritage. After my parents’ deaths, I will distribute gifts on their behalf. (DN 31.28)

When the Buddha gave this discourse to Sigalaka as a general teaching for laypeople, he was speaking at a time when multiple generations lived together in a common household. Day-to-day life was harsh, and life expectancy was short. The roles expected of children toward their parents were clearly defined by the culture.

Today adult children may live blocks or even continents away from their parents. Parents’ social security payments and retirement income may exceed the income of their children. The statement “I will support them” had a far different meaning in the Buddha’s agrarian society than it might today if a parent is living, for example, in a $3,000-per-month Alzheimer’s facility. What do we owe our parents, and at what expense to ourselves or our own family do we owe it? There are no simple answers to such questions.

How we are to support them, having been supported by them, seems to have been described throughout the Buddha’s teachings, especially on emptiness: We support them with nonharming and with kindness. The loving wishes for all beings in practices such as metta (see Chapter 8) most certainly represent the sort of support we try to give our parents: To the best of our ability, we support their physical and mental safety, comfort, and dignity.

Here is where right understanding of karmic seeds is so important. Even if we come from a dysfunctional family that generated more than its share of dukkha, we can break the cycle now. We do not have to continue responding the same way and planting more seeds of dukkha in ourselves through the way we treat our parents. Even if we do not feel unconditional love for our parents, we can act toward them in a loving way that is appropriate to our circumstances and theirs. As we’ll explore in Chapter 4, in great measure love means “being present.” If we come from a family where we were subjected to sexual abuse, being physically present may not be a realistic option. Even if our feelings toward our parents are especially challenging, we often can break through those feelings by sitting quietly and reflecting on our parents as children and contemplating what their childhoods must have been like. We can begin to truly understand that because of their own and their parents’ karma, they couldn’t be better either.

Within the Buddha’s teachings on rebirth and emptiness lies the idea that we have been or are every being who has ever lived. This idea is poignantly expressed by Thich Nhat Hanh in his poem “Please Call Me by My True Names,” about a twelve-year old Vietnamese girl, a fleeing “boat person,” who was raped by a Thai pirate and committed suicide by jumping off the boat and drowning. In Being Peace Hanh asks a critical question about three people—the girl, the pirate, and himself: “Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other?” When we open our hearts and ask that question of ourselves and our parents, the answer for us, as it was for him, is yes. When we experience our own emptiness and interconnectedness, we can find ways of being present and supportive by acting in a loving manner to help our parents do things they cannot do for or by themselves—for example, through financial assistance if that is feasible, by helping resolve legal questions, by helping them get situated in an appropriate residence, by telephoning or visiting them or sending them cards and letters, but in all cases acting toward them with kindness and compassion—as we would wish to be treated by our children.

Our Children

In the same discourse to Sigalaka where he laid out how we should treat our parents, the Buddha also explained what parents owe their children (DN 31.28). Parents are to keep their children away from evil and support and engage them in good; give them excellent educations and useful skills for everyday life and work; marry them into good families; and give them their inheritance in due time.

There are not a great many other places in the Buddha’s teachings where he explicitly gave guidelines about how we should treat our children, but there are many implicit assumptions. For example, in the Metta sutra, he stated that just as a mother protects her child with her life, so should we cherish all beings—a very clear statement of the nurturing bond that he saw as a given between parent and child. For our purposes in exploring right understanding, the key teachings are those passages dealing with how karma affects not only ourselves but our environment and those other beings in it. The effect of proximate, or “nearby,” karma is powerful indeed, and our most immediate “environment” is usually our family. In After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Jack Kornfield devotes a full chapter to “Honoring Family Karma” and defines family as “one of the final frontiers of spiritual development.” Considering how challenging family interactions can be, he notes: “Even the Buddha and Jesus encountered difficulties when they went back home after they started to teach.”

The analogy comparing our karmic actions to planting seeds is appropriate, literally, to having children. There are some important lessons to be learned from this metaphor:

If you plant an apple seed, you’re not going to grow an avocado.

The soil must be “healthful” for seeds to germinate.

Seeds are going to mature on their own schedule.

Pulling on seedlings will not make them grow faster.

For seedlings to flourish and develop into healthy mature plants, they must be watered, nourished, protected, and cared for continuously.

Karma tells us that the kind of seed we plant will determine what we get. The physical environment in which we plant that seed also has a great deal to do with how it will turn out. If, for example, either parent is a substance abuser, there may be genetic damage to a child at conception. During pregnancy the substances a mother takes into her body can affect the physical, mental, and emotional development of her child. There is also evidence that the emotional climate that a mother provides a child even within the womb can have lasting effects. After birth a child’s physical environment continues to create serious effects— malnutrition can have severe mental and physical outcomes. If we are to live a life of nonharming, our karma as parents must be to provide our children with the most nourishing physical environment possible, both before and after their births.

We have all known families in which children had all their physical needs met but nevertheless experienced severe dukkha as children and as adults because of the emotional climate in their families. To expand Ruth Denison’s statement about karma, in the emotional environment we create for children, nothing is lost. Because of the powerful long-term effects of our karmic bequests to our children, it is imperative that we, to the best of our ability, cultivate mindfulness so that we can give them the presence, attention, and devotion that they merit, because we are greatly shaping their future. Right understanding, especially regarding karma, is a major factor in the Buddha’s teachings on how parents can minimize the suffering of their children.