My friend just finished writing a fantastic book on Buddhism. One of the things I liked about it was that she covered the whole of Buddhism, and condensed it into small, digestible pieces. You don’t really find that very often, despite Buddhism being absolutely full of pithy sayings; it’s rare to find succinct, comprehensible explanations. I found a lot of value her approach, and I thought it would be helpful to offer my own version of that.
The Buddha said “I teach suffering, and the end of suffering.” This is the purpose of Buddhism, the culmination of the Path of practice: Enlightenment, or the end of dukkha (dukkha is roughly translated as suffering, or unsatisfactoriness, and should be read very broadly, as encompassing any kind of negative emotional reaction, great or small).
How does suffering occur? Human beings experience a sequence of events, the relevant portion of which is this: sense contact (something arises in one of the physical senses, or the mental “sense” that encompasses thoughts and emotions) -> vedana (the instinctive reaction towards or away from what we experience) -> craving/aversion (the wanting more or less of what we experience) -> suffering (if the wanting is not fulfilled, we suffer; if it is fulfilled, we either want more and suffer, or keep wanting while the object changes, and suffer). This is one formulation of what is known as dependent origination, which is the Buddha’s understanding of the conditional nature of reality (everything arises out of causes and conditions–everything–this web of connections connects us all). There are some intermediate steps in various combinations, nuances, etc., but at the root of it lies the fact that human beings experience sense contact, which will lead to suffering (not every sense contact leads to suffering, but inevitably some will).
The Four Noble Truths incorporate this understanding of the world, and highlight the most important link in the dependent origination chain discussed above–craving/aversion. The very powerful thing that the Buddha understood is that the simplest way to not suffer is, as noted in the Four Noble Truths, not to crave. The way to do this in the long term is to follow the Eightfold Path, which consists of learning to act and think in ways that rewire the brain at the very deepest levels to predispose our minds to crave less, by avoiding or interrupting the dependent origination sequence leading to craving.
The Eightfold Path is a big-picture look at how to change the patterns of the mind, and is helpful for orienting one’s self for macro scale actions (e.g. how to speak and act, how one should practice and behave ethically, etc.), but is less useful for guiding micro scale, in the moment behavior. The approach to the present moment, no matter the contents of consciousness, comprises three components:
- 1) Full awareness and acceptance of what is going on. Reality is as it is, and whatever reality is, wanting reality to be other than it is (i.e. not accepting it) is by definition dukkha. This is doubly true for painful things! Being ignorant of reality is also harmful, as it leads to delusion and suffering. In any moment, there is a choice available to either accept what is with equanimity, or try and push it away and suffer. The choice is generally quite clear when you can look at it; the task is therefore to remind yourself of the choice you are making.
- 2) Compassion and kindness for everyone and everything. Why would you do anything else? The instinctive reaction is often unkind, but what benefit does this bring you? Why would you respond with anything other than kindness? Feeling and acting on kindness feels… well, really good! Even when there are other emotions around it (e.g. fear of losing what you give, awkwardness, uncertainty how the other person will accept your kindness, etc.), they do not outweigh the benefits to being kind.
- 3) Take skillful action. You are not in control of whatever is happening in the present moment (or any moment); all you can do is try and nudge things in a particular direction, and try and set the conditions for particular outcomes to arise. Your nudging should have the Four Great Efforts as your lodestar (basically, orient the mind towards a wholesome state), and in every moment you can act skillfully with this in mind. Everything that happens is simply a node in a giant web of cause-and-effect that spans all of space and time; skillful action is simply (hah!) an action traversing that web which moves in a direction that leads to less suffering in the long run (what skillful action actually cashes out to in any given moment is situational, depends on what is going on, where you are at, your specific circumstances, etc. You probably can’t go wrong with holding one of the Brahmaviharas). Figuring out what is skillful, then, is part of the path.
All three of the components noted above are not generally present in the mind (at least not my mind!), and so the main task in all of this is to remember them (i.e. be mindful). There are any number of strategies to do so (e.g. meditation of various kinds, curating your life as to encourage that kind of mental state, setting triggers to wake up, etc.), but what the best approach is seems to be pretty individual. This is the basis of everyone’s Path; finding and implementing ways to be mindful, and using that mindful understanding of our reality to act in ways that will cause us (and others) to suffer less.
