The First Noble Truth: A Gateless Gate to the Four Noble Truths

The Tao of Pooh complains that Buddhism seems too dire with all its talk of suffering. People who are hurting want to be free from suffering and understandably want to pursue happiness. Some may also be afraid that if they let suffering be, they may become overwhelmed by it.

Of course, skillful means that alleviate suffering are helpful in some situations. For example it is sometimes possible to shift our attitudes or behaviors and feel better.

But we can become overly focused on habitually avoiding pain, and then we close off our hearts and lose the good stuff too, like love and compassion. As Gibran writes, joy and sorrow are inseparable. Look deeply into joy and sorrow is there. Look deeply into sorrow and joy is there. That which causes grief once caused us great happiness. Grief is a form of love. Only the veil of time separates them.

Buddhism offers a path to be free in the deepest sense, to be free not from but amidst suffering, to be free to feel both joy AND sorrow. 

Yes, there’s joy too! But we usually don’t need as much help accepting joy in our lives. Buddha shared the first Noble Truth that life includes suffering to specifically name it as a gateway to insight. He was saying, “Let’s begin by acknowledging and turning toward that which we usually try to deny. We’ve tried endlessly to avoid suffering by indulging our many desires and fantasies. How’d that work out? How about if we try something different.” 

Photo by Sandra Raponi

We do need help caring for and looking deeply into our suffering. That’s why the first teaching Buddha offered after his awakening was, “Life includes suffering.” There is not only light; there is also shadow.

We may want to skip this teaching to get to the "good stuff," but that's just more of our dualistic thinking trying to take charge again. That's just more being driven by desire to avoid life as it is, which Buddha clearly states is the source of our deepest pain. We might imagine that we can bypass looking deeply into our suffering and skip to the enlightenment part. We may chase mental states, seeking to be something other than what we are and running on the hamster wheel of self-improvement, ironically getting more self-involved and worn out. We may go into denial and repress our feelings. In this practice, our pain lingers under the surface of a mask that we wear. We may even judge ourselves and others when we feel unhappy, as if it is a failure of our practice. Ironically, the longing to escape pain is actually the greatest suffering. It can even take the form of suicidal ideation. 

Trungpa describes these strategies to avoid pain as the armor we wear, and it’s a heavy burden. We put on this armor imagining that we can separate ourselves from the causes and conditions that give rise to suffering in the world. Underlying this hope to protect ourselves is a belief in ourselves as separate entities, a "distorted view of reality, with each of us as selves at the center of their own universe, and everything else arrayed around us as our objects" which we try to manipulate for our own ends. "That leads to... anxiety about the preservation of the welfare of the self. All of this leads to greed, anger, fear, conflict, and general unhappiness" (Garfield).

We may try to gain control over anything that causes us suffering, but we just aren’t in control of many of the most important aspects of our lives. We did not choose when we were born, and we don’t get to avoid sickness, old age, death, and losing everything and everyone we love. The more we meditate, the more we see that we don't really have control over our thoughts and feelings either. As Trungpa says, “it’s completely hopeless.” This is why there are Buddhist books called The Wisdom of No Escape, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, and If You’re Lucky, Your Heart Will Break. Most of us need permission to simply feel our feelings and be whatever we are. Sangha is a safe place to have a broken heart. I wish it for you.

Why? Because when we turn toward the relative truth of suffering, toward what we think of as suffering, we find the absolute truth that there is no suffering. Buddhism is not so dire after all! 

One painful obstruction on the path is the delusive certainty that our life is Samsara and not Nirvana. Samsara is actually not separate from Nirvana. Indeed, get rid of Samsara, and there is no Nirvana. Get rid of the mud, and there is no lotus. Get rid of sorrow and there is no joy. Get rid of delusion and there is no enlightenment. Get rid of suffering and there is no compassion. Emptiness is exactly form.

We need encouragement and courage to look deeply into suffering with the eye of practice to see this for ourselves. We need to practice taking off our armor and opening our hearts. We practice opening our hearts while doing zazen. Practice does not mean believing our stories, getting caught up in them, and enacting them. It does not mean indulging self-reifying mental formations that might lead us to cause harm. Practicing zazen means sitting still, being quiet, and paying attention -- actually feeling all our sensations, including joy and pain, rather than getting wrapped up in our ideas. It means watching suffering arise and dissolve. It means watching senses of self come and go. Zazen is a great teacher, far better than philosophy. 

In zazen, rather than discovering any fixed essence in our suffering, we discover impermanence and flow. We also see that there is no innate, separate self to protect. 

Just like suffering, the self is made of nonself elements (water, wind, thoughts, feelings, etc.), all of which are constantly changing. We can let go of the relentless quest to control our experience and be the vastness unfolding. This is a practice of compassion: letting be. This is a practice of wisdom: looking deeply. This is a practice of vulnerability: opening to the thusness of our lives. This very life is boundless! It is not bounded by suffering after all. But we must see this for ourselves in practice.

In zazen, we become a refuge for ourselves and all beings. We discover an utterly reliable beauty, aliveness, and spaciousness that does not depend upon the content of our minds. This is the deepest form of liberation. This is the third and fourth noble truths realized: there is an end of suffering, and we find it right in the midst of suffering.

"When you understand the mind darkened by ignorance and see its real nature, then ignorance becomes identical to the enlightened nature" (Torei Enji). Turn around the light and shine it within, and the universe sings in our hearts. This is the most profoundly salvific Dharma.