Strong words from H.H., the Dalai Lama. His Holiness is never one to throw words around casually and so, if H.H. says understanding and experiencing the truth of The Four Noble Truths is the sine qua non for practicing Buddhist Dharma, then exploring them in depth is not negotiable for any of us. It is required.

Like many novices, I read a whole slew of Dharma books at Barnes & Noble before I ever picked up the phone and called The Center for Dzogchen Studies to find out how to enter the stream. In each of the books, no matter what the lineage of the author, I kept running into these things---The Four Noble Truths. [I also ran into the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind, the Five Buddha Families, the eight this’s and the nine that’s. I began to wonder if all Buddhists ever did was count up the numbers of stuff they believed in.] I speed-read the parts about The Four Noble Truths after awhile because they seemed like so many words and the different translators kept translating dukkha differently and spelling it differently and all I really wanted was to be able to stop my mind from churning whenever I was awake.

In one translation Dukkha was "suffering". In another it was "uncomfortability". In yet another it was some other negative term that I really didn’t want to deal with. It all seemed pretty drab to me---The Truth of Suffering, The Truth of the Origin of Suffering, The Truth of Cessation of Suffering and the Truth of The Path to Liberation from Suffering. Yuck! As I said, I just wanted to learn how to levitate, astrally project, cook great vegetarian meals and stop the chaos brought on by the imaginary committees inside my brain. Oh, and I wanted serenity too.

Padma Karma Rinpoche and the other students were quite patient with me and gently urged me (REPEATEDLY----I seem to require repetition to get any point that has nothing to do with desire or rage) to read The Four Noble Truths. Rinpoche gave teachings that always seemed to include references to The Four Noble Truths and slowly I started to realize that I wasn’t even in the stream because I couldn’t even list The Four Noble Truths in order, much less comprehend them.

Slowly I came to. I came to understand (in very small increments) that in my samsaric world, I am the conditioned, delusional, ignorant Prince of my own suffering. Thanks to an understanding of the First Noble Truth I learned that in my samsaric world, suffering is not an option or an accident. It is mandatory and pretty-near constant. (I used to be certain that all my suffering came about because other people wouldn’t do what I told them to… I’m glad that’s gone…So is my wife.) The samsaric world that I live in is always going to be unsatisfactory, says The First Noble Truth. (I knew that. But I figured if I got my way, it would change.)

The Second Noble Truth taught me that I was destined to suffer because I just didn’t understand how things worked. I was, to put it simply, too ignorant to find my own way out. I didn’t know how karma worked, I didn’t know that I suffered from afflictive emotions, and I didn’t have a clue that what I smelled, thought, touched, felt and said was conditioned by what my finely tuned brain told me I was smelling, thinking, etc. My God, I thought everything I experienced was as real as I was.

One good realization deserves another and so I stumbled across the Third Noble Truth which asks and answers the following question: If my world was so dismally screwed up and essentially phony and loaded with suffering, was there any hope I could find something the opposite of all that suffering? Or was Buddhism just a new way for me to find fault with me forever? The Truth of Cessation told me in no uncertain terms that I was empowered from birth and beyond to stop the unsatisfactory, uncomfortable suffering which is Dukkha. (Tell that to the next person who suggests that Buddhism is a negative practice.) I could go universes beyond what I have always believed is normal and my lot in life.

Which brought me to The Fourth Noble Truth, The Path. The True Path is many things, but I learned that it begins with accepting the emptiness of things, the lack of pre-existing essences of things, and then working with that concept until it seeped into my pores and, hopefully, this brain which has, for 60 years, grabbed at every pretty thing it ever saw and held fast to every comfort it could conceive of and some that never existed at all.

I have been on that path to the best of my ability ever since---with the usual relapses whenever a particularly intriguing electronics catalogue sashays across my desk or whenever somebody pushes one of my hard-wired shame buttons.

Without The Four Noble Truths, my practice would simply be some nice, peaceful, non-violent New-Age blood-pressure reduction techniques. With The Four Noble Truths, my practice can lead me to Enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings and the cessation of the suffering I have known all-too well.

I guess I’ll keep working on The Four Noble Truths because I have experienced enormous changes in my life, my attitude and my degree of suffering per cubic moment. And, after all, The Buddha himself said, Don’t take Dharma on faith. See if it works and if it does, keep on keeping on…

Jiangcho Gyatso

[Top]

"…unless you know that you are suffering, your desire to be free from suffering will not arise in the first place. So the first step we must take as practicing Buddhists is to recognize our present state as duhkha or suffering, frustration and unsatisfactoriness. Only then will we wish to look into the causes and conditions that give rise to suffering."

(H.H. The Dalai Lama)

In some ways Siddhartha’s father was the perfect new-age, modern-type parent. He locked away his beloved son in a world of beauty, wealth and painlessness where this fortunate child would never have to confront sickness, pain, suffering and loss. What Siddhartha didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right? Many of us have been parenting ourselves in the same way---we’ve tried to isolate ourselves from sadness, sickness, pain, suffering and loss. Our natural human yearning is towards happiness and away from suffering and we’ve done everything we can to manipulate the former and deny the latter entrance through our castle walls.

One of the problems with trying to maximize happiness in the traditional samsaric ways is that happiness doesn’t work the way we think it ought to. For example, if we like the warmth and coziness of fire we get some firewood and throw on a match. But, almost immediately the fire starts getting smaller as it burns up the logs. So we get more wood and decide that a bigger fire would solve the problem. But somehow the fire that was perfect and made us happy yesterday isn’t big enough today. So, we put on more wood until we realize that no fire is big enough to keep us as happy as we were when we first experienced our first "perfect" fire. What may be said for fire may also be said for chocolate cake, sex, vodka, designer shoes or whatever illusory delights we crave.

It must be, then, that happiness doesn’t work the way we think it does. Six hundred chocolate cakes do not make us 600 times happier than we were with one slice. And, as disappointing as it might sound, 600 sex partners do not make us happier than we were with our one fantasy ideal. Mrs. Marcos was never satisfied with her zillion shoes. And, I can tell you from painful experience, there is no drunk as pleasurable as the one I had far too many years ago---but that didn’t stop me from chasing it for 35 self-destructive years. I kept saying, "This time will be different" even if frustrating experience after frustrating experience kept telling me otherwise. Why didn’t I change my approach? Why didn’t I learn from the constant disappointments? In retrospect, I guess, I was afraid to look at the possibility that happiness wasn’t what I thought it was---that life operated on a set of principles that I didn’t understand or want to know about. Or, as Mark Epstein wrote, "The First Noble Truth of the Buddha asks us, above all, to accept the uncertainties we otherwise try to ignore."

Damn…

It doesn’t matter how we translate or spell duhkha---we still experience it the same way the Buddha said we would when he gave the Wheel its first turning: imperfection, emptiness, unsuitability, insubstantiality, dissatisfactoriness, frustration, hollowness, unrest, unreliability, anxiety, pervasive unsatisfactoriness, "a core existential insecurity". I had felt every one of those things, but I didn’t want to look at my pain and I figured I could find my own way out---MORE CHOCOLATE CAKE! MORE CLOTHES! MORE SEX! MORE OF---what have you got?

The Buddha illuminated three basic types of suffering that will always dog my steps so long as I keep walking down the same blind alley: 1) Fundamental Suffering----birth, sickness, ageing and death; 2) The Suffering of Change---that what is pleasurable and painful will not last and cannot be tied down and grasped; and 3) The Suffering of Conditioning ---that all my suffering in samsara is due to the fact that I am ignorant of how things work---that karma rules on the gross and subtle levels even if I don’t believe in it.

Gross suffering? Subtle suffering? All suffering is gross, isn’t it? Well, yes, but everything in Buddhism is about levels. When I began coming around for teachings I just wanted my mind to stop whizzing. Then, when I started to calm down a little I was ready to hear about subtler and deeper things that I had no idea existed. Gross suffering covers the really elemental things in my life. If I didn’t pay attention while sawing, I could cut off my fingers. If I drove like an idiot I could hurt you and me as well. If I didn’t pay attention to my diet, I could screw up my body. If I thought I wasn’t going to die, I was sorely mistaken…

The subtle stuff was and continues to be much trickier and, well, uh, subtler. That’s the "core existential insecurity" that Mark Epstein writes about---my essential samsaric ignorance of the simple fact that I am the brilliant and indefatigable author of my own suffering because I cling to the delusion that there is a Victor trapped inside me who can think his way out of this mess, using the self-same mind he used to get himself INTO this mess! All I have to do is find that Victor and I’ll be on my way (NOT!).

But, lest I get ahead of myself, let me end these remarks on The First Noble Truth by asserting what enlightened thinkers have said better than I could. First we have to understand that we have a problem. Nothing good can ever happen for us until we admit that our usual methods for achieving happiness (grasping more and defending what we have) have led us to more pain than we would care to admit. That’s all I must do---accept that all my habitual behaviors bring me an apparent happiness that, somehow, never lasts, always brings me pain and just makes me want to do them more until I get the courage to change. All the protective parenting in the universe will not keep reality outside our castle walls. Eventually, all our inner Siddharthas must discover that the castle walls can never protect us from what is totally real.

Jiangcho Gyatso

[Top]

(The 3^rd in a series of personal reflections on the first turning of the Wheel of Dharma)

"So together, delusions and karmic actions are the origins of our suffering."

(H.H. The Dalai Lama)

Just the other day I caught myself about to say to the lovely woman I live with: "I wouldn’t be saying this but you have driven me to it." Only my training in the teachings of The Historical Buddha and a keen sense of the absurd kept me from actually saying what was screaming to me inside my mind. Instead I stopped mind-rant and asked for a time out and went to sit in my shrine room until I could behave and think like a practicing Buddhist.

During my "Time Out" I meditated on why my desire to blame my wife for my anger was so patently hilarious. I only hope the reader and my wife will find my thought processes as divinely comic as I did.

Ever since I was old enough to remember what I think, I imagined that happiness and sadness came from outside of me. I remember with some delight the first time I ever saw a rabbit’s foot on a key-chain and asked what it was. I was told that it was good luck. If I rubbed it enough I would always be lucky. I was too young to grasp the existential contradiction in the question: "How could something so tragic for the rabbit be so fortunate for another sentient being?" I held onto that rabbit’s foot and rubbed and rubbed and I don’t remember if I felt lucky, but I do know that I spent most of my years thinking that good fortune was a result of finding the right things---the most helpful and pliant people, the smartest demands, mental agility, loads of cash, magic gee-gaws and a helpful dose of Grace (unearned blessings). I was never sure what made the people around me so lucky---or popular or talented or rich and smiley---but I knew that I hadn’t captured enough of what they had.

For a while I blamed my parents for not being wealthier. I was furious for a month that my parents were not the King and Queen of something because then I would have been truly lucky for life. I would have settled for being a Duke or an Earl. I was mad that my older brother had the Roman numeral 3 after his name. He was lucky, but not I.

Whatever it was, happiness and good fortune were something outside me and most always out of my control. Much of the rest of the pain and suffering in my life B.B. (Before Buddhism) came as a result of my thinking that I could keep sadness and suffering at bay if I could control people, places and things. After all, if happiness came from outside me, then why not give a shot to making my friends, lovers and the environment they lived in dance to my song? Wasn’t I entitled to be happy? Wasn’t unhappiness a curse unjustly handed out to those without rabbit’s feet?

When things went wrong, I caviled and cried, "Why me, Oh, Lord?" The universe was giving me the answer, but I never listened and so I never heard its reply: "Why Not You?"

So, I strove harder to make reality conform to my idea of happiness. The results were disastrous. The more I made myself "happy", the more I suffered every manner of hangover: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. I may have seen but I did not allow myself to admit that if I did good things I would get good results. My mind was too clouded and deluded to see that my own emotions of greed, lust, resentment, anger, envy, jealousy, ad nauseam were the very things that were standing between me and the serenity I had craved ever since I first rubbed the rabbit’s foot.

When The Buddha stood up from under the bodhi tree and began to teach the Four Noble Truths, he made it amply clear where I had gone wrong---in so many ways: "….that which is the cause or origin of absolutely everything" is my actions (karma) and my mental poisons.

Was I mad! Every time I tried to tell Lama Padma Karma Rinpoche that my neuroses and my unhappiness came from my woeful upbringing, he had the unmitigated gall to tell me I was living in a net of delusions that would keep me unhappy for this and every other lifetime I ever might enjoy. Unashamed, I craftily tried to blame my sorrows on my horoscope, my disloyal friends, my rotten bosses, my insane supervisors, bad luck, and my generation’s lame value system. He refused to buy the soap I was selling. Finally, I either had to accept what he (and every book on the Dharma) was saying or go back to my old ways and chuck the spiritual path altogether.

I am indebted to my teacher, Lama Padma Karma Rinpoche, and my sangha partners that they put up with me as long as they did before I made the choice to accept that my own afflictive emotions were leading me time and again to act in ways that could only lead to more suffering. If I could slay this inner enemy (my afflictive emotions) I had a chance to be free, joyous and, finally happy in a way I had never been.

Once I take responsibility for my own well being, I can never say, "You drive me crazy!" Oh, I can still have my moments, but they aren’t any fun anymore and all I can do is laugh when I hear that ancient child (still clutching its rabbit’s foot) crying out for the world to hurry up and be nice to me!

[Top]

My earliest memory in this particular lifetime is of lying to my mother---I was 3 at the time---in order to avoid the almost certain punishment that would come for being caught in the compromising situation I was discovered in. Somehow, at the tender age of 36 months I decided in that moment that truth might not be my best friend. Why I did not grow up to be a pathological liar I don’t know. However, even if I didn’t blossom fully into some sort of Jon Lovitz caricature ("Yeah, that’s the ticket…my wife, uh, Morgan Fairchild…") I certainly had no intention of telling the truth for the next 57 years if it meant I might have to suffer some sort of punishment.

During those 57 years I also discovered other sorts of vaguely addictive activities that appeared to save me from punishment, make me fit in, feel better about myself, made me feel warm and cuddly or just pleased me no end. Among these I must list all manner of innocent and not-so innocent pastimes as: gorging on sugar and alcohol, "…slander, coarse, aggressive, and useless speech…harming of life, sexual misconduct and stealing…"

For a long time I regarded these unattractive habits (for habits, read "defilements" in the Dharma) as things of which I was not proud, but I honestly thought they made me happier in the face of all the ugly things that life was throwing at me during those years. I had no clue that it was precisely those defilements that were making my life miserable in the first place! Once again I was ignorant of the Dharma teaching that the thing you may think is your best "friend" may actually turn out to be your problem! I was much like a smoker in the cancer ward who lusts for a Camel to ease the anxiety caused by his coughing.

It took a profound shift in my worldview to get me here, but I now believe (with the conviction of a person who has tried almost everything) that what The Buddha told us in The Third Noble Truth is indisputably TRUE! Not only that, but it gives me a hope and a trust and a faith that I never had before. (As I told Lama Padma Karma Rinpoche, somewhat ungrammatically, last Thursday night, "Nobody has it better than me.")

The Third Noble Truth is the one that is called "The Cessation of Suffering". In its simplest terms it says that, inasmuch as I am the author of all my own suffering, I can be the engineer of its removal. All I have to do is put on my spiritual HAZMAT suit and change everything about my life. It says if I am willing to give up all my self-indulgent, slovenly and non-virtuous behaviors, weed out my defilements, I have a chance to discover the ultimate truth of samsara---that the person I think I am is not the person I think I am and this ego I created to "protect" me from pain is the root cause of my pain and never existed the way I thought it did anyway.

How’s it working for me? Well, when I remember it, it works just as flawlessly as The Buddha said it would. When I forget, and my bad old conditioned behaviors come back, ("Yeah, that’s the ticket!"), my karma gives me a painful reminder in the form of the suffering I had grown so accustomed to. It’s a day by day thing. Hour by hour. No, if I am truthful, minute by minute. But I won’t quit anytime soon, because, as Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche says, "There are four main qualities of this truth of cessation. First, it is the cessation of suffering. Second, it is peace. Third, it is the deepest liberation and wisdom. Fourth, it is a very definite release." Not a bad result for just giving up my concept of self and the bad habits that never really made me happy…

[Top]