New Dharma Talks
The Third Noble Truth: the End of Suffering
Updated 06 Jun 2003
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The Third Noble Truth: the End of Suffering
We have been talking about Buddhism from the ground up, starting with Buddha’s enlightenment experience and the first teachings he gave: the four facts of life, the Four Noble Truths. The first one is dissatisfactoriness or dukkha — that all conditioned, created things are off-the-mark and ultimately dissatisfying. The second truth is the cause of this dukkha: Clinging to those dissatisfying things, investing in that fool’s gold, greed for those illusory, fleeting, impermanent things. The cause of that suffering is attachment, greed, clinging, thirst, fixation, craving — in Pali, tanha. Identifying with things as me and mine.
Now we get onto the third. We finally arrive at the Third Truth: Nirvana. Ahh! Enough of all this suffering already, let’s get onto Nirvana. We’ve been running for so many miles, when are we going to get there? Nirvana, the Third Noble Truth, the end of suffering. First there is the fact we all face of dissatisfaction; then its cause, attachment; then the end of suffering, the fact that suffering does have an end, dissatisfaction does have an end — that the fire of craving and clinging, the roiling ocean of the passions of conflicting emotions, does have an end. The end is in Nirvana, the cessation of craving and clinging, the great peace, everlasting fulfillment, enlightenment itself.
The cause of our gnawing dissatisfaction and anxiety is incessant greed and demandingness, which generates the friction that irritates us so much. Although Buddhism has filled up many, many shelves with books and teachings, according to the Buddha himself it all comes down to the fact of our dissatisfaction with things, the cause of it, and the end of it — which means the real relinquishment or burning out of the fire of craving, the irritating friction of wanting, of clinging, of holding on to that which cannot be held for long. For everything changes, nothing remains. And only contentment is true wealth.
Nirvana is ever-present, just on the other side of the tight knot of our clinging. We can actually experience it in a moment. It’s not something that we have to build up for a long time with concrete. It’s available through breakthrough, ah-ha! experiences. These can be cultivated by simply letting go, relinquishing craving, clinging, attachment, greed, and delusion. The word Nirvana originally means extinction or annihilation of suffering. The example given is when a fire goes out — when even the embers are cooled, when the conflicting emotions are no longer burning us — this is the cessation of dissatisfaction and suffering, the end of the friction of duality rubbing against itself creating that fire, the friction of attachment. This friction is generated by me — as subject — wanting other — as objects — and the interaction between the two; this friction that irritates us finally blazes up into a fire, the fire of suffering.
I try to be careful with words. I talk about the conflicting emotions. Of course, I am translating from a foreign word, a Sanskrit and Pali word, kleshas, which is defined as greed, hatred, and delusion. Not unconditional love, but attached, greedy love. Not unconditioned compassion or empathy, but dualistic pity, like looking down on others, feeling sorry for others. There is a very big difference. So the conflicting emotions, the defiled passions, the selfish emotions are suffering. Pure love is truth. It’s not a conflicting emotion. It is warm, caring, nurturing; not indifferent or complacent, yet full of equanimity, clarity, and spiritual detachment.
Of course, most of us are afraid, unwilling, and even momentarily unable to let go of our conflicting emotions, because they form our habitual, comfortable nest. That’s where we live. So it is scary to shake that up. Let’s look into that and see what we get out of it. Maybe we want to continue in that way. Who says we shouldn’t? Let’s be very honest with ourselves. Then we can move, if and when we choose to.
Detachment doesn’t mean indifference. It is more like equanimity or evenness. It’s like the elders enjoying the children’s games, participating in the children’s games without being totally taken in by them. If you’re young, maybe detachment and renunciation seem a little scary. Maybe you need to explore attachment a little more. Get a little more attached and see what it brings.
We don’t have to give up anything really, except attachment and expectation. You don’t have to give up your family or anything. It is attachment to family and loved ones that makes us unhappy. If you have children, maybe you feel that they don’t visit you enough. You don’t have to give up the children, but you can experiment with trying to give up that expectation that they should visit you more, because it is that expectation or wish that makes you unhappy.
Every day we are very involved in our lives, and we care a lot about what happens. That’s perfectly natural. But go on vacation for a few weeks. Go travel for a year, and look back at your daily travail here from afar. Even go to the beach for a few days. Then look back and see what being detached from all of the day-to-day hustle and bustle means to you. Maybe there is room for something else to come out, to come up, wherever you are. Not exactly the same things, but maybe you find your self a little more since you are not so absorbed in all the things you are daily attached to here. Consider vacuum cleaners. They have a lot of attachments stuck to them; it’s excessive baggage. It’s hard to navigate when you have all those attachments stuck to you all the time.
The question of attachment and desire is one of the most misunderstood things in the spiritual realm. Spiritual detachment means equanimity and evenness, an unconditional openness to everything. We all want to give up pain, but we don’t want to give up pleasure; there’s a problem there, since those two go together. It’s desire either way: We want what we want, and we want not to have what we don’t want. It is equally wanting, demanding, craving, dissatisfying. It is coming from separateness, illusion, and misunderstanding. We run our whole lives bouncing around on the pleasure/pain principle. “I want. I don’t want.” It’s exhausting.
One of the interesting things in the Third Noble Truth is the notion of the cooling of the burning, conflicting emotions, the loosening up of those defiled, selfish passions. It is tied up very much with sila, morality, which literally means cooling. The more we simplify our lives, the more honest and straightforward we are, the less there is to worry about. Things become more clear. We are more focused, clear, cool. There’s not so much going on, like looking over your shoulders. Because we are truthful, there’s less to try to remember! There’s less friction. We are straightforward. So morality or self-discipline and character is very important and conducive to this cooling of the fire of suffering. It helps things get clear, straightened out, and simplified. Then we’re just a vacuum cleaner that does its job. We don’t have all these extra, crooked attachments on us. We can just know that everything is available. If you need something, you can just pick it up and use it any time, then put it back down. That’s detachment. You can use everything, but you’re not stuck with anything, including your ego, your body or mind.
Anger is just an energy, before it becomes aggressive. You should see if you can release it, liberate it, rather than constricting around it or identifying with it — “My anger. I’m a bad person.” Because you just get more angry with yourself for being angry, it’s a vicious cycle. The definition of samsara or conditioning is vicious cycle. So letting go undoes that vicious cycle of conditioning, that tightly coiled spring of reactivity. Then all the emotions become the display of wisdom, like the wrathful deities in tantric iconography, surrounded by flames — anger transmuted or realized as pure energy, not as aggression. It can be very wakeful. It manifests as discriminating awareness. It sees very clearly what’s wrong so it can deal with it. It’s not aggression. It is very pointed, sharp, and clear-seeing; helpful, not harmful. An adornment rather than a hindrance.
The place to feel the energy is before you see somebody as deserving anger. It’s more like you feel angry and experience the heat of the energy arising, and it’s just there. Perhaps you need not do anything about it but notice and experience it as energy, heat, or whatever form it takes.
We feel it simply because there is anger inside of us. There are seeds of anger, seeking objects to focus on. The imprint of grasping finds an object to grasp onto. Without an imprint there is just all this stuff floating around in the substratum of consciousness, as it were. The imprint is looking for expression, looking for a means to release itself. It’s all just creative display. The ego is looking for a way to perpetrate itself, so it is accumulating all of those bubbles as if they shore up and help confirm ego’s territory, ego’s illusory existence. The alleviation and end of that is up to us. We’re the ones that are rubbing the two together. We’re the firestarters. We’re the troublemakers. It’s all in our hands, the hands of duality, subject and object, grasper and grasped. That’s why the Dzogchen meditation teaching of resting in the natural state is so important, and cuts so deeply to the heart of the matter. When there is nothing wanting, there is nothing working against anything; there is no grasping at anything; there is no grasper and grasped; there is no two sticks rubbing together creating this fire of the passions, clinging to beautiful sights or sounds or smells or tastes or touches. There is just the unimpeded, free experiencing.
As Buddha said, “In seeing, there is just seeing. No seer and nothing seen. In hearing, there is just hearing. No hearer and nothing heard.” This suggests thoughts without a thinker, as the much-recommended, new book by Mark Epstein about Buddhist psychology is called. Buddha said in hearing there is just hearing; no one hearing and nothing heard. Can we be that empty and open and clear? The answer is that we choose not to be. Guess who chooses? Who’s responsible? It’s scary, so we’d rather not face up to it. Thoughts without a thinker is too scary. We’d rather write down all those precious thoughts for prosperity, catch those poems, those flashes, those haikus going by in the flickering thought-stream. We identify with thoughts and reify a solid thinker out of that mere shimmering luminescence.
Letting go is like the suburbs of Nirvana. That release point is like the approach to Nirvana. Nirvana is the end of suffering, so releasing is an approach to it but since the spring recoils every moment, it has to keep being released until it doesn’t recoil, contract, and constrict — until the knot is released, the curl is straightened out. Only Buddha statues can sit there with no pain, no wants, no nothing! It’s the end of the habituation, the clinging, the contraction and retraction. Releasing is fine, but what happens in the next moment? Conditioning reappears. Yet continuous practice can decondition. Nirvana is the end of all those conditioned states.
When Allen Ginsberg, who is a disciple of the late Vidyadhara Trungpa Rinpoche, was going to do a one-month retreat on the foundational practices (Kagyu ngondro) in Colorado about fifteen or twenty years ago, he told Trungpa Rinpoche how he was going to bring many little pads that he would keep by his meditation cushion and write down those beautiful haiku that would flash after many hours of meditation. Trungpa said, “Can I see your pads and pens?” Then the lama snatched them away, saying that the reason to go on retreat and meditate is to stop collecting and holding onto all those thought-bubbles.
Ginsberg loves to tell this story, because he is still — like all of us — so attached to the beautiful mind-bubbles. The more we meditate, the more good ideas we seem to get, don’t we? We can’t wait to go back home and tell somebody, write about them, paint them, whatever! Bottle them, market them. Nirvana perfume. Nirvana books and tapes. Enlightenment records!
Nirvana, the end of all this woeful suffering, the extinction of this fire of craving, is just on the other side of each moment of craving, of holding on. That’s where the great Letting Go comes in and must take place. Then the great peace is there; total fulfillment, wholeness, the end of all thirst and incompleteness; luminous, profound; simple, not complicated, yet utterly profound; delightful, joyful; unknowable, unfathomable, bottomless, yet inexhaustibly rich. Not like those little thought-bubbles that we are always trying to collect so that at the end of one month at least we have something to show for ourselves; a whole pile of little bubbles on a pad, big deal!
Even Allen Ginsberg’s precious poetic verbiage is still better left on the compost heap of present awareness, at least from the point of view of the Dharma. Of course, we love poetry and we love Allen Ginsberg and we love everything that is original and fresh; but still, it is canned, it is stale compared to simply experiencing the startling, poetic freshness of the present moment without having to can, to write down, collect, or fabricate anything. Then every moment bespeaks truth, not just literary musings.
If you wonder what good is your spiritual life, I will up the ante: What good is music? We intuitively believe and know that it is important. Our muse is calling us. We can’t necessarily figure out what the connection is between music and the alleviation of suffering. And yet we feel called. Otherwise you could volunteer and go to help in Bosnia or Rwanda. Or go and help Mother Teresa in Calcutta. Or help find survivors in Oklahoma City. But don’t forget, even in Oklahoma City, in all the churches there they are having prayer vigils and asking for prayer from all over the world. It’s because people actually draw solace from that. There is a support system there; we’re all connected, right? That’s how inner work also helps in an outer sense. That’s a very visible, tangible way, through our mutual interconnectedness. Even with such a horrible thing, with all those people dead in Oklahoma City and all that militant right-wing saber-rattling — it’s really a mess — let’s examine what part of that aggression and alienation is still in our minds, and root it out. The part of us that is racist, fanatic, dogmatic, aggressive, downright stupid, angry, bitter, whatever. We can all feel helpless before the enormity of such an evil as that terrorist bombing, but we are not helpless to find it in ourselves and pacify it there. We are not helpless or hopeless in that sense.
I hope that’s helpful in some way. We all have our place in the universe. I think that is a very important thing to settle more into. It might very well be going into relief work. Or it might be being a musician. Or a poet. Look at all that Allen Ginsberg has done. He had done a lot, through his acute sensitivity, sociopolitical conscience, and decades-long commitment to truth, both outer and inner.
Spiritual work doesn’t just refer to inner or quietist activity. It can also include altruism, service, community building, and so on. Compassion means empathy and love; you should feel others’ joy also. It is not just that you feel others’ pain. It’s that you feel what others feel, which opens the narrow aperture around which we are constricted. It’s not just that we have more pain; we also have more joy. What we really have is less selfish preoccupation; we are taken beyond ourselves. It’s like if you have children around, in one way they drive you crazy, but what they really do is drive you beyond yourself. You can’t just stay with your ordinary preoccupation. They lift you out of that somehow. Like your music practice does, perhaps.
Needless to say, enlightenment, Nirvana, perfect freedom is not exactly what we think. But still, let’s not be too mystified by all of those high-faluting words. According to Buddha himself, it is simply the relinquishment of craving, of clinging, of attachment. Yet this is not a small thing. But the more our spiritual practice, our meditation, and our activity in life is congruent with that — the less rigid, inflexible, demanding, and greedy we are — the more Nirvana starts to creep in, very insidiously, since it is there all along and it is we ourselves who are holding it away from us. It is always right here; we are always elsewhere! It’s not just like the guy with his thumb in the dike. We are the dike and there’s a tiny hole where it is trying to creep in through. Let’s widen that inner aperture a little bit by relinquishing some of our barricades, our persona, our holding on, our fixated, repetitive, addictive, habitual behavior — in short, our conditioning. Get off the treadmill of conditioning for a moment and let the light in — or, for that matter, let it out. We are the dike. It won’t be there for long, but we are doing our best to keep it together. Can we let go? Or is it too frightening to contemplate?
It requires a shift in perspective. Do we currently think holding on and collecting things and experiences is going to solve our problems? Do we realize that everything is slipping through our fingers anyway, so there is no need to exhaust ourselves by trying to hold on forever? We must look into this for ourselves and really develop a certain amount of world-weariness and see that we are quite invested in the fool’s gold of our own self-concepts and our pleasure-pain dichotomy, accumulations, possessions, activities, always being busy, being who we think we are. No wonder we are exhausted! It’s a full-time job, keeping all that together, like a lifelong juggling act or charade we constantly maintain.
When we really do let go and get used to letting go, that inner fire, that irritation, that friction-heat of suffering actually does die down, and we can experience more and more of the inner peace that Nirvana epitomizes. We become less dependent, less demanding, less complicated; less speedy, needy, and greedy.
Good energy is more subtle than bad energy, but it is also perhaps more long-lasting. It might seem that the negative energy is more dramatic, so it gets more news coverage. No news helicopters are racing to some other state where everything is peaceful. I think it is incumbent upon us to foster the good, to engender the best in others as well as in ourselves, and to just keep showing up — whatever happens, keep showing up as a witness to the goodness and truth we believe in. We must keep showing up and not let the darkness overwhelm us.
We must remember that following is a choice. Who empowers the leader? I don’t think we should engender followership anyway. We should engender leadership. We have to take responsibility for our choice, find out for yourself. Let’s foster character and leadership, not just create followers.
That’s the Third Noble Truth. The fourth one, the final one, which is in a way the most important — although the first one is the most important to know — is the path to the end of suffering, which is the Eightfold Noble Path, in short: ethics, meditation, and wisdom. I’ll talk about those under the title of the Eight Principles of Enlightened Living to complete our introduction to the Four Noble Truths.
It is that eightfold path that actually leads to or actualizes the way to the end of suffering, which is called Nirvana, the burning out of the fire of craving — the evaporation of the ocean of suffering which all created, conditioned things are subject to. If you can find any thing that isn’t, please let me know so I can go out and buy some. I’m still looking, as I’m sure you are.