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+ | ====== Life Isn't Just Suffering ====== | ||
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+ | "He showed me the brightness of the world." | ||
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+ | That's how my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, once characterized his debt to //his// teacher, Ajaan Lee. His words took me by surprise. I had only recently come to study with him, still fresh from a school where I had learned that serious Buddhists took a negative, pessimistic view of the world. Yet here was a man who had given his life to the practice of the Buddha' | ||
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+ | Only when I began to look directly at the early texts did I realize that what I thought was a paradox was actually an irony — the irony of how Buddhism, which gives such a positive view of a human being' | ||
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+ | You've probably heard the rumor that "Life is suffering" | ||
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+ | A fair number of writers have pointed out the basic confidence inherent in the four noble truths, and yet the rumor of Buddhism' | ||
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+ | According to Genesis, this was the first question that occurred to God after he had finished his creation: had he done a good job? He then looked at the world and saw that it was good. Ever since then, people in the West have sided with or against God on his answer, but in doing so they have affirmed that the question was worth asking to begin with. When Theravada — the only form of Buddhism to take on Christianity when Europe colonized Asia — was looking for ways to head off what it saw as the missionary menace, Buddhists who had received their education from the missionaries assumed that the question was valid and pressed the first noble truth into service as a refutation of the Christian God: look at how miserable life is, they said, and it's hard to accept God's verdict on his handiwork. | ||
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+ | This debating strategy may have scored a few points at the time, and it's easy to find Buddhist apologists who — still living in the colonial past — keep trying to score the same points. The real issue, though, is whether the Buddha intended his first noble truth to answer God's question in the first place and — more importantly — whether we're getting the most out of the first noble truth if we see it in that light. | ||
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+ | It's hard to imagine what you could accomplish by saying that life is suffering. You'd have to spend your time arguing with people who see more than just suffering in life. The Buddha himself says as much in one of his discourses. A brahman named Long-nails (Dighanakha) comes to him and announces that he doesn' | ||
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+ | The Buddha then teaches Long-nails to look at his body and feelings as instances of the first noble truth: they' | ||
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+ | The point of this story is that trying to answer God's question, passing judgment on the world, is a waste of time. And it offers a better use for the first noble truth: looking at things, not in terms of " | ||
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+ | Other discourses show that the problem isn't with body and feelings in and of themselves. They themselves aren't suffering. The suffering lies in clinging to them. In his definition of the first noble truth, the Buddha summarizes all types of suffering under the phrase, "the five aggregates of clinging": | ||
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+ | So the first noble truth, simply put, is that // | ||
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+ | This process takes time, though, because we can't simply tell the mind not to cling. It's like a disobedient child: if you force it to let go while you're looking, it'll search for a blind spot where you can't see it, and will start to cling there. In fact, the mind's major blind spot — ignorance — is the prime cause that gives rise to clinging' | ||
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+ | So the real question we face is not God's question, passing judgment on how skillfully he created life or the world. It's //our// question: how skillfully are we handling the raw stuff of life? Are we clinging in ways that serve only to continue the round of suffering, or are we learning to hold to the ladder-like qualities that will eliminate craving and ignorance so that we can grow up and not have to cling. If we negotiate life armed with all four noble truths, realizing that life contains both suffering and an end to suffering, there' | ||
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