How Does Suffering End? The Meaning of the Third Noble Truth
ANDREW OLENDZKI
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN
GAYLON FERGUSON
Since the Third Noble Truth is about the cessation of suffering, we should first discuss what suffering really means.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Suffering (dukkha) covers a wide spectrum, from physical pain, aging, and getting ill or injured up through the suffering that comes from change and on to the psychological suffering that results when we don’t get what we want or when things go the way we don’t want them to. Finally, it includes the suffering occasioned by great existential issues, like the fact that we’re all going to die. Suffering is primarily the resistance to the truth of those things.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: We all experience old age, sickness, and death, which are classical categories of suffering. No one is free from those. The Buddha says that suffering is simply present in our life. It’s not right or wrong or good or bad. It’s just our experience.
GAYLON FERGUSON: Traditionally, we say there are three kinds of suffering: the suffering of suffering; the suffering of change; and fundamental or all-pervasive suffering.
The suffering of suffering means that if we burn our finger, it hurts. The suffering of change is the alternation from one condition to another, and the change can go both ways: from a pleasurable condition to something painful, or from something painful—that we nevertheless get accustomed to—to a happier state. That instability alone is suffering, which leads us to the third kind of suffering, our struggle against things as they are.
So the fundamental suffering, the suffering of fixation, one could say, has to do with the fact that we are attempting to solidify what is a fluid and impermanent situation. That happens even in moments of apparent happiness, if we are holding on to those moments. Traditionally, it is said that with practice one becomes more sensitive to this basic suffering. Initially, it might be like a hair touching the hand, but for the wise, this fundamental suffering is like a hair touching the eye.
Why is the first kind called the suffering of suffering?
GAYLON FERGUSON: The original phrase is simply dukkhadukkha, the pain of pain.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: When these words are put side by side, they’re being used in two different ways. The first just means pain, as in pleasure (sukha) and pain. That level of pain is never going to go away. Even on his deathbed, the Buddha said, “My body is wracked with pain right now.” Pain is a feeling tone, which is one of the aggregates. It’s hardwired into the mechanism of the human mind and body, you might say.
But when you put the second word after it, dukkhadukkha, then it’s used in the other sense. Pain is inevitable, but the distress caused by that physical pain will go away when you’re enlightened. So in the phrase dukkhadukkha, the first dukkha is simple pain and the second dukkha is the resistance to that pain.
GAYLON FERGUSON: In fact, these kinds of pain are intertwined; we can’t actually separate out a given physical pain from the resistance and struggle with it. If there were less struggle or no struggle, what would that original pain be like? We don’t know what an enlightened person experiences in terms of so-called physical pain.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: The famous kōan of Baizhang’s Fox indicates that an enlightened person doesn’t ignore pain. I recall when Suzuki Roshi was dying with cancer, I was with him and noticed that he grimaced as if he were having some physical pain. When it subsided he said, “Hmm, my karma is not so good” instead of “Oh my god, this is so terrible! Why me?”
Yet even fledgling practitioners can transform their relationship to pain to a certain degree, can’t they?
GAYLON FERGUSON: Of course, mindfulness-based stress reduction has shown that when mindfulness lessens the struggle with chronic pain, the pain is somehow lessened.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Dharma practice is intended to help us to stop stabbing ourselves with the second arrow, rather than concerning ourselves with the arrow that has already penetrated us, as the traditional analogy goes. The physical pain is inevitable, but as we resist it or feel sorry for ourselves or wish it were different, we continue to jab ourselves. That’s the emotional suffering we experience in the face of the pain.
Having discussed the nature of suffering and of conditioned existence, how do we understand cessation in that context?
ANDREW OLENDZKI: The idea of cessation does obviously invite the question, “Cessation of what?” There’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding throughout the Buddhist tradition about what we mean by that. For example, you have the issues that came up in China at the time of the founding of the Zen tradition when the Northern School of Chan essentially said that if we empty our mind of thoughts, we’ll be free of suffering. The Southern School said that if you empty your mind of thoughts, you’re just like a rock or a stone. This led to the distinction that there is an emptying of the mind, but what is emptied is the resistance to what is happening, rather than what is happening itself.
The Buddha was very clear that cessation of suffering is not being without consciousness and perception and all the rest of it. What happened to him under the Bodhi Tree, as I understand it, is that he became an altered person. He still had a body like the rest of us; he still had the five aggregates. What ceased was wanting things to be different than they were, which is craving.
GAYLON FERGUSON: In the Heart Sutra, Śāriputra gives a pithy synopsis of what the Buddha taught: “Regarding dharmas that arise from a cause, the Tathāgatha taught their cause and also their cessation.” That’s a lion’s roar proclamation that we are not doomed to struggling and fighting with life. There is another possibility.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: David Brazier talks about cessation (nirodha) as originally meaning an earthen bank. He offers the image of being down behind a sheltering bank of earth or putting a bank around something so as to both confine and protect it, like containing or controlling a fire.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: As a skillful means, that might be very effective, but containment as an image seems too limiting. For a householder trying to get by in the day-to-day world, there are ways in which the experience of dissatisfaction can be contained—through stress reduction and wiser choices, for example. But what’s radical and inspiring about the Buddha’s message is that the fundamental mechanisms in our mind and body that construct suffering can in fact be dismantled. The roots can be pulled up from the lowest levels, such that the suffering is no longer constructed at all.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: What I like about the containment image is that we can talk about the fire of passion and not needing to put it out, because fire is useful. If it can be contained and controlled, if you put it in the oven, you can cook with it. But you want to protect it, to keep the wind of greed, hate, and delusion from blowing it out of all proportion. At the same time, you don’t want the embers to go dead. You want to employ them for a useful purpose.
Doesn’t that sidestep the notion of extinguishing?
GAYLON FERGUSON: Can’t we have both? Yes, there is pulling up by the root and extinguishing, but in the Lankāvatāra Sutra it says, “Skillful farmers don’t throw away their manure. They use it.” They spread it on the field of bodhi. So the containment is the sense that the basic energy could be used for waking up.
If you’re not stopping the fire, what are you stopping?
ANDREW OLENDZKI: I think it is the fire that you’re stopping. The three unwholesome roots of greed, hatred, and delusion—these three fires are blazing across the whole field of experience. Awakening and nirvana has to do with extinguishing the fires. But we have to be careful not to be too hard on ourselves. Just because the Buddha says it’s possible for these fires to go out, it doesn’t mean we should expect it to happen by Tuesday.
More to the point, he’s saying this fire is burning in almost every moment of your experience. You are craving, and therefore you are suffering. Just come to know it, understand it, befriend it. You’re not encouraging it to continue per se, but rather you’re being at home with it. It’s not so much about an ideal state where this just doesn’t happen, although that is a placeholder at the end of the path; it’s more about what is happening every moment.
Notice that. Look at it. Learn from it. Understand it. Experiment with how you can hold yourself differently in any given situation to diminish its effect. It’s really a matter of how to play with fire, rather than how to extinguish it. But when you play with it long enough and skillfully enough, it goes out.
GAYLON FERGUSON: It’s very helpful not to beat yourself up if you’re not getting to it. If we are contemplating our experience and inquiring into our experience, we will notice it, just as the historical Buddha did when he remembered a time sitting under a tree at the plowing festival, when he had a moment of cessation, stopping.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: That’s true. Most students, most of us, have had some taste of that.
GAYLON FERGUSON: People can recall a glimpse. I’m not saying they’ve had full or final cessation, but they can recall a moment of not struggling.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: And because they’ve had some taste of it, they turn to practice and they can breathe freely in the world. They have a taste of dropping the boundary that separates me from other. They can feel that expansive inclusiveness, the interconnectedness of everything with everything. We have experiences like that, but we don’t know what they are or what to call them.
The Third Noble Truth has sometimes been called the “the goal.” Does that make sense?
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: The idea of goal kind of jangles me when I remember how strongly Suzuki Roshi said, “No gaining idea, no goal-seeking mind.” Practice is about fully opening ourselves and accepting what is, as it is, in all its stuffness.
GAYLON FERGUSON: According to the teachings of Dōgen, that’s not a goal but rather our original state, right?
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: To have some gaining idea or goal means that as you are right now is not OK.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: I would add that since we construct our reality every single moment, and the five aggregates arise again with or without the influence of craving and ignorance, there are multiple moments throughout the day in which you could experience cessation. It could be the cessation of one of the defilements, one of the obstacles. For example, you could be sitting in meditation and your foot starts hurting. You see the physical sensation mounting along with your resistance to it, and your concern around it becomes more and more proliferated. At a certain point, you can recontextualize what’s happening, let go of the resistance to it, and settle in to what’s actually happening. In that moment, the whole complex of resistance to that sensation ceases, and in the next moment something new is created. Perhaps we overdramatize the idea of what this whole awakening experience is. Well, maybe not the Zen tradition.
Like with everything else in the Buddhist tradition, this notion is useful as a verb and harmful as a noun. Teaching people how to have things cease is very useful. It’s very dynamic and alive. Getting fixated on the notion of cessation as a noun, either occurring or not occurring or being attained or not attained, is heading in the wrong direction.
But cessation is essentially nirvana, which is a state, or at least a noun?
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Actually, it’s more often used as an adjective in the Pali canon, applied to a person who has become quenched. The fires have been quenched, extinguished; they’re cool. They’ve become cool.
All we’re saying is that nirvana is what the Buddha attained under the Bodhi Tree, and that there’s incremental progress toward it. But I don’t see it as a state in the sense that, you know, I slipped into nirvana for an hour or two. There are also gradations—stream-enterer, nonreturner, and so forth.
GAYLON FERGUSON: Dzongsar Khyentse talks about the classic four marks of view in his book Why You Are Not a Buddhist, and the fourth one is “nirvana is peace.” He emphasizes that nirvana is beyond conception.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: I would call it the inconceivable.
GAYLON FERGUSON: Yes. It’s certainly not our concept of happiness.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: My actual experience is that after a number of years of practice, I’m a hell of a lot happier than I was before I started practicing. That’s undeniable. My teacher named me Zenkei, which means total joy, and at the time I asked myself what the heck he named me that for. Now I really appreciate it, because there is a lot of joy in my life.
Isn’t the ego’s search for happiness the very root of suffering?
GAYLON FERGUSON: I’m sure we all agree that seeking happiness is the cause of a lot of suffering. That’s classic Buddhadharma. The very struggle to always be in any particular state is what the Second Noble Truth is about. Yet it makes sense to start where people are and lead them to something deeper. Then we can open into a wider sense of what happiness is. Happiness isn’t just the limited positive states we strive for, but rather there is a larger openness that includes sorrow and joy. That would be true happiness. The conventional understanding of happiness is materialistic, but people come to realize that a good life actually might be a life based on compassion and serving others. And indeed, longtime practitioners often do say there is more happiness in their lives.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Our word “happiness” is probably too limited. With “suffering,” we were saying that there’s physical pain and then there’s the resistance to that, which is a greater existential meaning of dukkha. Maybe the same could be said for pleasure. There’s physical pleasure and mental pleasure, but the Buddha was saying that it’s possible to cultivate a mind that’s larger and more balanced in the face of either pleasure or displeasure. It’s a matter of getting to a wider mind that can embrace both and still experience profound well-being. Well-being is not necessarily the same as happiness. Happiness is just a matter of stringing together pleasant moments.
Compared to happiness, isn’t the truth of suffering an off-putting place to begin presenting the Dharma?
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: Not necessarily. Acknowledging suffering can set up a connection among us, the sense that we’re all in this boat together.
GAYLON FERGUSON: In a consumerist culture, you wouldn’t usually deliver a product by beginning with unhappiness. But of course the teachings of Buddhism do go against the stream that there is pleasure and then greater pleasure and then greater pleasure after that.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: In my experience, it’s not a very good place to start. Trying to convince Americans of the truth of suffering is no small challenge. So many people are insulated from it, or have thought their way around it, that it’s an uphill struggle.
GAYLON FERGUSON: Not all teachings begin with the truth of suffering. In the buddha nature teachings, one begins with nonstruggle, basic sanity, as the basis. Then one might proceed to discovering how we’ve covered over our fundamental nature, open spacious awareness, through habits of karma and kleśa. We have become constricted and we struggle. The Buddha taught a variety of skillful means for different beings, and the Four Noble Truths we are familiar with is one such skillful means. In the Flower Garland Sutra, a slightly different version of the Four Noble Truths is presented, from the buddha nature viewpoint.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: In the classical teachings, the Four Noble Truths is not so much the beginning point as the ending point. It summarizes the essential insights that the Buddha had that brought about his awakening. I find it more effective to mention the truth of suffering halfway through the curriculum rather than on the first day. At that point, we understood enough to know how much we’re kidding ourselves and constructing an illusionary life. We can see that underneath the illusions we create is the tangible experience of discomfort.
The goal of Buddhism is sometimes described as the lessening of suffering. Is that a sufficient description of cessation?
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: It seems that complete cessation is to prevent the arising, rather than do something about it after it’s arisen.
But surely we want to lessen suffering.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Classically, we’re invited to do both. With unwholesome states that have already arisen, we work toward understanding what’s causing them, and abandoning them. That lessens suffering in the sense that we’re able to catch it earlier. In the case of those unwholesome states that have not arisen, we’re supposed to do various practices to help guard against them, to prevent them from arising.
GAYLON FERGUSON: Buddhism involves the lessening of suffering, but it’s not only about the lessening of suffering. That’s the distinction.
ZENKEI BLANCHE HARTMAN: With respect to the lessening of suffering, I’m interested in not just working on our own states of mind. What about hunger in the world? What about homelessness? What about war? What about the massive social suffering we see in the world? Does cessation in Buddhism have anything to say about that?
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Once again, I think it works at both levels. Yes, by all means, go out and alleviate suffering wherever you see it by whatever means are available. At the same time, gain a deeper understanding that any suffering in the world is caused by greed, hatred, and delusion. Ultimately, one can best influence others by setting an example oneself.
GAYLON FERGUSON: It also helps to make a distinction between something therapeutic and something radical, something that goes to the root. The therapeutic model is about offering temporary relief. The Four Noble Truths are a radical diagnosis. They are about going to the root of and then preventing the causes of war, domestic abuse, and so forth.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: I’m an optimist. I think we can do it. I think we can perfect human nature. I think we can clear up all of the violence in the world. But we’re going to do it primarily by transforming the hearts and minds of human beings. We do have to go out and heal the sick and feed the hungry, but, ultimately, what’s going to be more transformative is changing the attitudes and attachments and aversions of individuals running the societies in which the abuse and violence is happening. Given the interdependence of self and other, that has to happen in concert with changes within ourselves. A simple analogy from the early texts is that a person who’s embedded in quicksand can’t help somebody else in quicksand. You’ve got to step out and get on solid ground in order to pull someone else out.