The Four Noble Truths: The Truth of Suffering
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, Australia, Sydney, 15th July 2000, Tape 1.
Sometimes in Tibetan Mahayana circles, the Lord Shakyamuni Buddha is rather overlooked. There are so many more exotic deities out there that sometimes people sort of forget the Buddha. Who is he? Oh yeah, that guy way back then… So, I think it’s important to go back to the roots, to go back to the real foundation from which everything in subsequent centuries grew. What is more fundamental to the Buddhist view than the first sermon which the Buddha delivered on the Four Noble Truths?
For those of you who have no idea what this is all about, I will start by putting this in context. We are 2,500 years ago in northern India on what is today the Nepali border in this little kingdom of the Shakyas. Actually, there still descendants of the Shakya lineage who live in Nepal today. So, this is not a myth, this is not a fairy story. The Shakyas really did exist. In this little republic of Shakya lived the Buddha who at that time was the Prince Siddhartha Gautama. He was living in a palace with his father, his stepmother and his wife. He was very sheltered because at his birth, a clairvoyant had told his father that this boy would either become a universal monarch – a great king – or else he would leave the world and become a Buddha, an enlightened one. His father was very afraid that he might leave the world, and so he did everything he could to protect him because he wanted his son to become a great king. Therefore, the Buddha led a very pampered and sheltered life as a prince.
One time when he was an adult, he asked to be allowed to go outside and to look around the kingdom. He went out—some say on three separate occasions—and what he saw was a sick man by the side of the street, a corpse being carried along, and a very old man hobbling by. Whatever it was that moved him—whether he had never before ever witnessed sickness, old age and death, or whether for the first time it really struck him very deeply—he was profoundly moved in the very essence of his being and deeply troubled by this.
Here, I will just add a little aside. I was raised in London and had a very pleasant childhood, there was nothing wrong with my childhood, although my father died when I was two and my mother had brought up my brother and me by herself. We lived in a happy and harmonious household. One time when I was about 13, my mother and I had been spending a pleasant evening with my uncle and aunt. Now we were waiting at the bus stop to go home. Suddenly, I watched all these buses going by full of people, some people were talking, some people were reading, some people were dozing or looking out the window, and I thought, “All these people are going to get sick and old and die. And if they don’t get old it’s because they die when they are young. We all are going to be sick, we are all going to get old, we are all going to die”. That was a sudden intuition of our true situation. It is as though we are all on a train and this train is going to crash, but we don’t know when it is going to crash. We just know that it will. So then would we really just be sitting gazing out the window or reading a book? Wouldn’t we be putting our life in order and thinking for ourselves what is important in this life, and what is not?
So, I said to my mother, “You know that we are all going to get old, to get sick, we are going to die. Really, life is so full of suffering.” She herself had had terrible sicknesses; she was in heavy debt; she had so many problems struggling to bring us up. Anyway, my mother replied, “Yes, there are difficult things in life, but there are nice things too.” And I thought, “You’ve missed the point! If there wasn’t sickness, old age and death, it would be fine, but there is. That sweeps aside all the rest. We’re not preparing for this, we’re not ready for this.”
So then five years later when I read the account of the Buddha seeing the old man, the sick man and a corpse, I understood in a small way what he had realised at that point. Later, he sees the figure of an ascetic just wandering by looking very calm in his yellow robes, and realises that renunciation is the way out of this dilemma. I didn’t see anybody spiritual at that time. I had to wait.
The point was that the Buddha saw that underlying our ordinary everyday life was the spectre of sickness, continual aging and finally death: a death which we can never predict since we don’t know when we are going to die. Later on, the Buddha said that the one thing certain in life is death. We are all going to die, of that much we can be sure. It is said that which is sooner – the next breath or the next life – who knows? We don’t know. People have sudden heart attacks and they are gone. The other day I was in Melbourne and going one early morning to a talk there. As we were going along there were schoolchildren standing around looking completely dazed beside the school bus. In the middle of the road was a figure of a young woman lying there, who had just been hit by the bus. It was so soon after the accident that nothing had been done. The body wasn’t even covered, she was just lying there on the ground. Everybody around was in a state of shock. That young woman didn’t think, “Oh today I’m going to die”. She had her morning planned out. Probably also what she was going to do tomorrow and next week and next year. Then snap – next life.
So, we don’t know, and most of us are totally unprepared. This is what the Bodhisattva saw in that moment intuitively: that life is so insecure. Then he lost all his taste for the palace pleasures, even for his wife and his family. He was deeply troubled. He thought, “Life has this undercurrent of insecurity and dissatisfaction. Why is this, and what can we do to go beyond this continual round of birth and death and rebirth and re-death and being constantly recycled?” When he saw the figure of the ascetic, he decided to leave home. He thought, “I have to give my whole attention to this. This is the most important thing to understand: why do we suffer?” The point is he had everything. It wasn’t that he was actually personally suffering. He was young, he was handsome, he was extremely talented, he was very athletic, he had an adoring, beautiful wife and a whole harem of admiring, beautiful concubines. His wife had just had a son; his father loved him; his stepmother loved him; everybody loved him. He had everything: everything was going for him, everything we are told is what will give us total happiness. He had it, and he wasn’t happy.
This is the important thing to understand. When Prince Siddhartha left the palace, he was giving up everything which we think and are told by society is there to make us happy. Everything which society tells us is desirable and essential for our happiness. When he left the palace, he was in search of the meaning of this underlying dissatisfaction of life, even when on a superficial level it looks like we have everything. First, he went to teachers of meditation who taught a kind of calm-abiding meditation. In these types of meditation, there are various levels of increasing subtlety of mind until the body is no longer relevant. We are no longer in our body, we are totally in the mind, in very high stages of neither perception nor non-perception, in an infinity of consciousness, infinity of space—very rarefied levels of meditation. He achieved those levels of meditation, which at that time was considered to be liberation. But he realised that this is not liberation, these states are still within the realm of birth and death. These still do not explain suffering and what causes suffering.
So, Prince Siddhartha left those gurus and he wandered with five companions practising extreme asceticism for many years. He had been at first very indulged in the senses: living in his palace with all the beautiful women and the musicians and wonderful food, beautiful clothing, lovely smells; all the senses were totally indulged. That had not brought happiness. So, then he went the other way and he tried extreme deprivation, finally living on only one grain of rice a day until his body became so weak he could hardly walk. But still, the mind was not liberated. This was also not the answer. Then he accepted a meal of milk rice from a village girl near to a river in Bihar. She was going to make an offering to a tree spirit but when she saw the Bodhisattva sitting there, she had faith in him and offered the milk rice to him instead. He accepted and ate that. Meanwhile his erstwhile companions decided that he had given up his austerities and become very lax. They were disgusted and they left him and wandered off. So, the Bodhisattva was left there alone on the banks of the river. He went down to the river and he bathed and he made a vow that he would attain Buddhahood in this lifetime or else he would give up altogether and kill himself, because life had no more meaning if he could not break through to ultimate reality.
He sat and he meditated under the Bodhi tree, remembering a time when, as a boy, he had watched his father doing the ritual ploughing. He had used his mind to look inside, and guided his analytical faculties to go deeper and deeper into the mind itself. He thought that this was the method to use. Meditating like that through the various watches of the night, going back through his own rebirths and then through the rebirths of all beings in the universe, he finally, in the last watch of the night, understood the interconnections and the inter-relativity of all things within the universe. In this way the bodhisattva became a Buddha.
When he attained enlightenment, he understood how everything worked. At first, he thought, “This Dharma is so subtle. People are so uninterested in this, they won’t be able to understand what I’m talking about. So why bother?” Then he just sat for seven weeks under seven different trees just enjoying the bliss of his liberated mind. Finally, according to the story, the Gods Brahma and Indra came to him holding a Dharma wheel and saying, “You cannot just sit here enjoying the bliss of your liberation. You must help beings.” The Buddha replied, “Beings will not understand this subtle Dharma.” But the Gods said, “There are some beings who have only a little dust in their eyes. They will understand, so you have to go and turn the wheel of the Dharma.”
And so the Buddha set forth. He walked from Bodhgaya in Bihar to just outside the city of Varanasi in what is modern day Uttar Pradesh. He came upon a deer park named Sarnath and there he met up with his five former companions. When his five companions first saw him, they said, “Oh here comes Gautama. We know him, he’s really lax, he left off all his austerities. We of course have to be polite and greet him when he comes, but we’re not going to show him any respect because he’s dropped away.” As the Buddha came along in the very glow and dignity of his bearing, without even intending to, the five ascetics stood up, they prepared a seat, bowed down and they asked him to be seated. This was when the Buddha then taught his first teaching. It is termed the first turning of the Wheel of the Dharma. When people give a talk on Dharma, on Buddhism, it is called turning the wheel. It has to do with a certain mythology about the universal monarch who conquers by following a golden wheel in the sky.
He turned the Wheel of the Dharma for these five companions. In that first turning of the Wheel of the Dharma, he gave the quintessential points of what he had realised. So this first sermon is very important, because after he preached it, the ascetics all attained realisation spontaneously. So it is very crucial, and this is what we are going to go through in a very simple way this weekend.
The Buddha taught what are called the Four Noble Truths. This is the truth of duhkha—duhkha is usually translated as suffering, but it means the basic underlying dissatisfaction of life. The truth of the cause of duhkha. The truth of the cessation of duhkha – how duhkha can cease to be. And fourthly, the truth of the path leading to the cessation of duhkha. So this is fundamental, this is the basis from which all other Buddhist doctrines come forth. What is duhkha? Duhkha is the opposite of sukha, and sukha means ease, so therefore duhkha is dis-ease. It’s that underlying angst in our lives. Consider: basically, all human beings want to be happy, however we define happiness—and some people define happiness in a very peculiar way. Nonetheless, we want to feel satisfied, and we give out enormous amounts of time and energy and thought into how to make ourselves happy. Forget other people, let’s make ourselves happy! We give large amounts of money for what we hope will secure us satisfaction and happiness. Houses, cars, food, clothing, our appearance, our education, entertainment, new computers, bigger and better technical equipment of all sorts, the latest movies, the latest flavour in ice cream. Anything which we hope will make us happy. Our society colludes in this. It is always telling us that if we have a high-powered job, lots of money, big houses, beautiful clothing, fast cars, the envy of all our contemporaries, we will be happy.
Look at Australia. You have a beautiful environment, good weather, fairly clean cities, nice houses, food and clothing. On one level, this is a God realm compared with so many places in the world. So why are you all not brimming over with joy? Why do you have one of the highest suicide rates in the world? Why is alcoholism and drugs such a problem? Why? You have so much, and this much is supposed to bring you happiness, satisfaction. Just like Prince Siddhartha, he had so much.
This question of duhkha is a really very essential one and one which we are not really facing in our society. People still believe that, somehow or other, if they just keep running fast enough, they will manage to keep at bay this underlying sense that there’s something wrong. Duhkha doesn’t have to be something very obvious. Of course, when we are sick, when we have the pains of old age, when we lose somebody that we love, when we are unemployed, when we find ourselves as hopeless alcoholics, then yes, duhkha is very obvious. For many people, the pain in their lives is very clear to them. But it can be subtle too, it can be very subtle. For a time, we can have everything we want – a loving family, successful children, a big house, a nice car, a rewarding job: everything going absolutely perfectly. Still there’s something missing. Still, somehow, it’s not quite right. What we’re talking about is that underlying sense of dissatisfaction. The Buddha defined duhkha as being not only obvious things like old age, sickness, death, but also as not getting what we want and getting what we don’t want. Does that sound familiar? No matter how much we cushion our lives, we are all going to be in a situation where we do not get what we want and where we do get what we don’t want. This is always going to be happening because it is the nature of the world.
Life is impermanent. The Buddha said that there are three basic characteristics of existence: Existence is inherently unsatisfactory (duhkha). It is impermanent, changing moment to moment, it is flowing (anitya). And nothing, either ourselves or others, or phenomenal things, have any inherent self-existence from their own side (shunyata). Yet we cling to things. We cling to things thinking they are very solid and real. Inside us, there is this sense of emptiness in a negative sense, not in a positive sense. Not in a sense of inner spaciousness, but in a sense of inner lack. This sense of need we are always trying to fill up and because we don’t know better, we try to fill it up with things and with people. We hope that if we get more and more things and have more and more meaningful relationships, these will fill up this hollow inside. Sometimes, for a very short time, it seems to work. For a moment, we get everything we want, the person we love loves us, everything is going fine. It looks like eternal happiness is here – and then it all falls apart again. This is for everybody. Every single being in this universe has these same problems.
The last time I was in Australia, I went to visit someone who had leukaemia and was dying. He was like a skeleton. He was about 50 years old, he had a wife and children, and his parents had come to visit him. I heard they just celebrated their 90th birthday. They were very upset and couldn’t accept that he was going to die and they said, “How could this happen to us?” Ninety years old and they were asking that? I took them to the window where there were the crowds below in the street moving backwards and forwards, and I said, “Show me one person who has not lost somebody that they love. Why shouldn’t it happen to you? It happens to everybody else”.
It is this sense of denial. We all lose people we love. The nature of existence is impermanence. Nobody sticks around forever, ever, anywhere. We lose people we love, we lose things we love, we lose the body we love, we lose so much. We don’t accept it. And because we don’t accept it, we suffer. It is this underlying dissatisfaction. We want to have something, we work so hard to obtain it. Say we want a new car. We work extra hard, we put in extra hours, we do so much and finally, finally we get our new car. We are so excited and so happy. We drive it around and we hope everybody is full of envy and we feel really good about ourselves. The next week, we’re sort of excited but, you know, by the next week we’re thinking we’re bored with the car and now what? It’s got to be something else because that fizzed things up for a bit but then it all went stale again. It’s got to be something else, and then something else, and then something else, and then something else… We are exactly like those rodents on a wheel. We are scrambling like crazy till we’re totally exhausted and getting nowhere. Still, inside, there’s this sense of emptiness, this sense of lack. We’re still desperately trying to be happy. It’s really quite amazing. We try so hard to keep ourselves satisfied and pleased. Normally we fail so abysmally, even though we put so much time and effort into it.
Because we’re deluded, this is why. We’re looking in all the wrong directions. We have to first face the problem. The Buddha said that we are all very sick. There is the reason for our illness. There is a cure for our sickness and there is the remedy to cure us. That’s what the Four Noble Truths are all about. First, we have to accept that we are sick. If we don’t accept the fact that there is a problem here, we won’t really have the energy to look for a solution. If we deny that we are sick, we won’t try to find the cure. The truth of duhkha, the truth of this dis-ease, which is a disease, has to be faced and recognised.
It’s very interesting. In the West, before they met jolly Tibetan lamas and people like that, and they just read the books, they said, “Oh, Buddhism’s always talking about suffering. These Asians, they’re so pessimistic. They’re always going on about suffering and impermanence and emptiness and dreary things like that. That’s because they’re very passive and gloomy and they don’t have the get-up-and-go spirit of the West.” It’s very interesting when you visit Buddhist countries. One of the first things that always strikes people is that in Buddhist countries, people are so cheerful. Wait a minute, this is a pessimistic religion, how could they all be so smiling and cheerful? I read in one of the first Tibetan dictionaries ever written by a Moravian missionary something like, “It’s true that in Tibet the people are happy and cheerful and good natured and generous, but how much more happy they would be if only they had the Truth”.
One time, when I was living in my cave—it was the first year I was there—in the winter, it hadn’t snowed. It is a disaster when it doesn’t snow up in the mountains since the rivers which flow through India will have little water in them. One day in the spring I was sitting in my cave and a group of three lamas from the monastery where I had been staying before, came by and said, “We’ve just been to your little water spring. Since it’s been so dry this winter your spring and the spring at the monastery are the only ones which are still running. We put some naga medicine into there and we did some pujas to the naga spirits to bring some rain and snow.” Nagas are the spirits of the water and they live near springs, rivers and lakes. They also influence the weather. Often, they are shown with a human upper part and a lower part like a snake. So, I invited the lamas into the cave and we were sitting, having tea and I said, “Oh, it’s clouding over.” And they replied, “Well, yes it will, we just asked the nagas to bring us rain.” By the time they left, the snow was falling. Then it snowed non-stop for seven days. This was no joke. At that time of year, the ground was no longer frozen and all moisture just went through, so my cave was soaking wet. After seven or eight days, it completely drenched my cave. The lamas came back and they said, “Oh, we’ve just been to the spring and put in some more naga medicine and done some more pujas.” And I said, “Please, we don’t need any more snow.” So, they said, “No, no, we told them to stop now.” So, we were sitting having tea and I said, “It looks like it’s clearing up.” And they said, “Yes, we told them to stop.” Again, by the time they left, there was clear blue sky, no more snow. For what it’s worth.
But that’s not the point of this story. The point of this story is that while it was snowing like this, because the ground was no longer frozen, the water just came into the cave, all over, through all the fissures. So, the cave was soaking wet, absolutely flooded and I hadn’t realised it would do this. Later, I understood that this is what it does in the springtime. Everywhere was sopping wet, it was leaking all over. I had to move my meditation box because it was getting wet. Everywhere was wet, the wood for cooking was wet, I had a headache and a cold and I felt yucky. I was sitting in my little box covered up, with everything dripping all around and thinking, “They were right, cave dwelling isn’t so great!” I was feeling very miserable. All at once I thought, “Hold on. Didn’t the Buddha say something about duhkha? Didn’t he say that life inherently is not satisfactory? So, life’s not satisfactory, what’s the problem?” At that moment I thought, “Yes, this is duhkha, so? It’s natural that our round of births and deaths will be duhkha. So, what’s the problem?” Suddenly it wasn’t a problem.
If we open up and accept duhkha, that life is naturally duhkha, why are we surprised when things don’t go right? Suddenly, I felt completely happy, because the problem with duhkha is we try to avoid it and because we try to avoid it, we are caught between hope and fear. We hope that it won’t touch us and fear that it might. If we drop all that, there is no problem. So what that it was snowing? So what that it was cold? So what that I felt horrible? So? There was no problem any more. It was like this huge weight that we are normally carrying dropped off. It was this weight of trying always to attract pleasure and fend off pain; the fact that we don’t accept that this existence is not satisfactory. Once we accept that, then suddenly there’s no problem any more. That whole defence which we set up against anything we perceive as being unpleasant, can then just fall away. And then whatever happens we can deal with it.
One time when I was in Thailand—I had just been ordained for a few months—I met up with a Thai princess. She invited me to go and stay at her estate by the sea. She had a very beautiful estate and I was given a little Thai house of polished teak in the middle of a lotus lake and two servants to take care of my every possible need. Two minutes through the mango groves was a silver beach with palm trees, deep turquoise water and nobody—it was a private beach. I started feeling guilty. I thought, “Here I am, a nun who has renounced the world, and look at this!” I said to the princess, “I feel very uncomfortable in this situation.” She replied, “Why? You didn’t ask for this, you didn’t try to manoeuvre things to get this. It has all just come to you. It’s not going to last very long, but while it’s here just accept it. When things come to you, that’s nice. And when things don’t come to you, that’s also nice.”
That equanimity of mind is the important thing. We can go the other way and only feel satisfied when things are difficult and start feeling guilty when things go well. The human mind is very tricky. It is that equanimity—when things are going well, we accept that. When things are not going well, we accept that too. That is a great freedom of the mind. That’s why the emphasis in the Buddhadharma is on the unsatisfactoriness of life, on the impermanence of life, on death and dying. Far from making people pessimistic and gloomy, it liberates the mind. We are all going to suffer duhkha, we are all going to suffer ill health and death. If we close and blinker our eyes and we refuse to think about old age and death; if we refuse to think that life could, by its very nature, be unsatisfactory, then when we experience these things—and we will experience these things—we don’t know how to handle it. All we can do is to try to wave it off and try to run back to pleasure again. That is a tremendous burden.
Today we are with somebody we love. Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow they might leave us, voluntarily or involuntarily. We don’t know. We can never know. Today, we are very wealthy and successful, tomorrow, the market crashes. We don’t know. Today we are healthy and young and tomorrow we have an accident or we discover we have some terrible disease. We don’t know. Life is very insecure and if we refuse to face that, then we are of course in the grip of our hopes and fears. Our very unrealistic hopes and our unexpressed fears. So then we suffer. This is why it is really important to face these things. If we face them here and now and accept them, then they don’t have such power over us. It is very interesting that in the West now everybody talks about sex in every variety—that’s no big deal—but death, nobody wants to talk about death. Death is the last taboo. Even when someone is dying, they don’t talk about death. Again, I went to visit someone who was on the brink of dying and his wife said to me, “Could you ask him about the funeral arrangements?” Me? I didn’t even know the guy! Because she couldn’t ask him, she couldn’t say to him, “You’re dying.” They had never discussed death. There he was dying, every breath looked like it was going to be his last, and they had never discussed the fact that he was going. This fear and this refusal to accept impermanence is a great source of suffering for us. In Buddhist countries where death is considered perfectly normal, when we come into birth, everybody rejoices. When we die, everybody accepts this.
What we are usually thinking is that we are here in this world to have a good time. Underlying everything is that idea—we’re here to enjoy ourselves, we’re here to make ourselves as comfortable and as happy as we can manage. That’s what life is all about. So if it seems like we are succeeding – even if we are miserable inside – as long as outwardly it looks like we are having a great time, that’s enough. Because then everybody will believe the facade, the glittering image and envy us. And somehow that’s supposed to make us feel good. So, we keep up this pretence as though everything is wonderful and we’re really happy, we’re really having a great time, because that’s what we are supposed to be here for. If we are suffering in any way, that is a failure. That means we have lost. So we cannot admit that. To be successful means to be happy, happy, happy.
But maybe that’s not what we’re here for. Maybe this delusion is why we keep getting recycled. Maybe we’re here for something quite different. Maybe we’re here to really begin to look into what this whole thing is all about. Maybe we’re here to learn, to develop, to cultivate, to go beyond the whole concept of happiness and suffering, to see through it. But we cannot do that until we acknowledge the situation very clearly. If we close our eyes and say, “No, basically life is quite nice. Sometimes it’s a bit inconvenient, but basically it’s good,” then we’re missing the point and we won’t get any further.
That’s why the Buddha started with this. He could have started from anywhere. One time the Buddha was in a jungle and he picked up a handful of leaves and he said, “Which is greater in number, the leaves in the jungle or the leaves in my hand?” So, of course the people around him said that the leaves in the jungle were infinite whereas the leaves in his hand were so few. And the Buddha said, “Well, using this as an example, the leaves in the jungle are how much I actually have realised, how much I know, and the leaves in my hand are what I’m telling you. But what I am telling you is all you need for liberation.” The rest doesn’t matter, the rest is just a distraction. The Buddha has a vast, omniscient mind. Yet where did he start? He started with duhkha because that is our situation. It was the situation for people 2,500 years ago, and it’s still our problem today. We are not happy, and we try so hard. We are not happy and we don’t make the people around us happy. It’s not that we wake up every morning thinking, “Oh how can I make this day really miserable for myself and others?” We don’t. But we do it just the same. We work so hard, we get ourselves into all sorts of weird relationships. Why? Because we want to be happy. Because we think if we work really hard then we’ll get lots of money, so then we can buy all these things which will make us happy. We get into relationships, often really strange relationships. Not because we want strange relationships, but because somehow in our deluded mind we think that this ought to make us happy. We get caught up in all sorts of strange activities and do so many unskilful things. Not because we want to cause problems and trouble, but because somehow we think this is going to help.
So basically, we have a problem, and unless we face the fact that there is a problem, we cannot go forward. Unless we face the fact that life as it is ordinarily lived is a sickness, we cannot go forward to find out what is the cure.
Questions
Q: You spoke earlier about the recognition of the displeasure of the rain and the cold and discomfort in the cave, and you uttered the delightful words, “So what?” That was very delightful, but I see some pitfalls in the aversion toward duhkha and the inherent desire for sukha.
JTP: Absolutely, but what is your question? Of course, there is a lot of danger in having aversion to duhkha and a desire for sukha.
Q: There seemed to be an inherent recommendation to get a distaste for the disease so that we search for the cure.
JTP: I see. Yes, it is on two levels here. We have to accept is that at one level, the very nature of samsara is unsatisfactory, so not get too worried when things don’t go well. But at the same time, the spiritual quest is to go beyond suffering. We cannot get ourselves cured if we don’t recognise that we’re sick. Do you see? So that in this way, we have to motivate ourselves by realising that there is a sickness, there’s something wrong. Not just with external things. The problem isn’t out there: whether we get things or we don’t get things, whether things go well or don’t go well. The problem isn’t that. The problem lies within us. What is the reason why samsara is unsatisfactory? It’s not whether there are dripping caves or not. The problem is our clinging to the idea of pleasure.
We have to accept that we don’t have to suffer. There is a state beyond suffering.
Q: As you were speaking earlier, there was no sense of suffering. There was a delight in your descriptions.
JTP: Yes, because at that moment I got rid of the cause of suffering in my psyche. The cause of suffering is our clinging mind. When that fell apart, there was no suffering any more. The cave, the wet, the headache and the cold were still there, but the internal cause of resenting this and the subsequent suffering had—at least temporarily—fallen away. Therefore, there was no problem. That is the solution.
Q: You were speaking this morning about suffering and how in some people it is terribly pronounced, terribly, terribly strong—in terms of the hopeless alcoholic. If you are close to that sort of person in your own life, and you love them very much, what can you do in your own mind or practice or in their life for them?
JTP: It is a problem. Basically, you can send them lots of loving kindness. It depends, as each situation is very different. For example, if you are in a situation which is a very abusive one, then merely accepting it and being mild and sweet while someone’s trying to beat you up is not the solution. Meditation is not just to make us peaceful and calm. Meditation is also to give us clarity in which we see the situation clearly as it is and therefore understand, through compassion, the appropriate response.
Sometimes, it can happen that the appropriate response outwardly doesn’t look very loving and compassionate, it can sometimes be very wrathful. As when you have a very naughty child and you just smile at it and pat it on the head and say, “Don’t do that darling, don’t go near the burning stove with the boiling water on it, sweetie. No, don’t do that, darling. Don’t get any nearer, sweetheart, that water’s going to hurt. No, darling, don’t do that”. You know the child is going to tip the water over and scald itself. That’s very patient, full of loving kindness but stupid.
At that time, you have to be wrathful, you have to make that child understand that that is not the thing to do, and stop it. You don’t do that out of anger, you do that out of compassion. But compassion doesn’t always have to be very sweet and smiling. The Bodhisattva of Compassion is shown as white and smiling, very peaceful: everybody’s idea of compassion. But in the Tibetan tradition, the other side of the Bodhisattva of Compassion is Mahakala, and Mahakala is a very wrathful protector—black and very fierce. Because sometimes, merely being sweet and nice doesn’t work and isn’t going to help. Sometimes, we have to appear very wrathful. And if that wrath, that ferocity, comes from a compassionate wisdom mind, and not from anger and negativity, then that might be exactly what is appropriate at that time.
So when we are in difficult situations, we need the clarity and the wisdom to really understand what is appropriate in that situation, and motivated by compassion, we try to do that. It’s not easy and every situation is different. That is why we need to have that clarity of mind to see what is appropriate, what can benefit that being in a way which really helps the situation and doesn’t just cloud the issue or perpetuate the predicament when it is a negative one. It is not easy and that’s why we need wisdom along with compassion. Otherwise, you get what is called idiot compassion—idiot compassion is ever so loving and kind, but it doesn’t see clearly so it just makes more of a mess. That’s why wisdom and compassion go together. Seeing the situation really clearly and beginning to understand what would be the best kind of action under these circumstances.
Q: My question is about the Buddhist belief to not eat meat. I love animals but often I have heard of people having a lot of problems being on a vegetarian diet. And then, there is this concept of the delineation between plants and animals. I’m sort of in a quandary about that belief.
JTP: Of course, not all Buddhists are vegetarians—most Buddhists are not. The Tibetans, for a start, are very carnivorous, and also in South-East Asia—in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma and so on which are Buddhist countries—people there eat a lot of fish and meat. The only people I know in the Buddhist world who are strictly vegetarians are the monks and nuns in the Mahayana Chinese and Korean traditions. Actually, I am a vegetarian, so I’m not defending my territory here, but in fact most of the Buddhist world is not vegetarian and it seems the Buddha himself was not a vegetarian. I think one has to accept that as a monk, he was going around from door to door and the idea was that you accepted whatever you were given without discrimination.
However, I do think that in this modern day and age, we have to consider the meat industry which is so horrendous. The sufferings of these animals raised in often appalling conditions solely in order to kill them. So, then I think is a good thing if we do not acquiesce to that whole system by buying meat and eating it.
I do not believe that whether one has a vegetarian diet or a non-vegetarian diet has anything to do with enlightenment, because some of the most enlightened beings I know adore meat, and some of the most un-enlightened beings I ever met were strictly vegetarian!
As to the question of plants and animals, the fact is that as the Buddha himself said, the Dharma is a middle path between extremes. The Jains who were contemporaries with the Buddha, believed that everything including plants had a soul and so therefore the logical conclusion which their great saints come to is to sit in one place, not move and starve to death, which they did.
This doesn’t seem to be the solution, and the Buddha himself said so. The point is that this world is by its nature imperfect. It is based on eating and being eaten. Although there are plants, they have a very short life-span and they are not moving beings. They probably do not have a mindstream and belong to a different plane of creation. Therefore, it seems that to eat a turnip is of a dissimilar level than to eat a chicken or a cow. We have to eat; everybody has to eat. The point is that the poisons are in our mind. How to eradicate the poisons in our mind and how to see into our true original nature, that’s what’s important. Not what we eat or don’t eat, provided it doesn’t create suffering for other beings. Nowadays the meat industry causes a lot of suffering for many beings. I don’t think that the plants are particularly suffering and when we eat them that’s their life-span; they’re going to die anyway pretty soon. Otherwise we starve ourselves to death, and what for? That doesn’t solve anything. We shouldn’t be extreme: this is the middle way.
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May All Beings Benefit
Sarva Mangalam