From Chapter 1: Recognizing the Reality of Suffering

Seeing our pain as it is, is a tremendous help. Ordinarily, we are so wrapped up in it that we don’t even see it. We are swimming in oceans of ice water of anxiety, and we don’t even see that we are suffering. That is the most fundamental stupidity. Buddhists have realized that we are suffering, that anxiety is taking place. Because of that, we also begin to realize the possibility of salvation or deliverance from that particular pain and anxiety.

The reality of pain or suffering is one of the basic principles of the hinayana, the foundational teachings of Buddhism. There is suffering and pain—someone actually has to say that. It is not polite conversation; it is serious conversation: there is pain. However, unless we have an understanding and acceptance of pain, we will have no way to transcend that pain. The Sanskrit term for “suffering” is duhkha, which also has the sense of “anxiety.” We realize that throughout our lives we are struggling. We struggle because, in our being, we feel we are what we are and cannot change. We are constantly anxious. Why? Goodness knows! Only because we have basic goodness, or innate wholesomeness, in us can we feel the counterpart of that, which is discomfort, anxiety, and confusion. In order to take a photograph, not only light but shadow is necessary.

Pain comes from anxiety, and anxiety comes from neurosis. The Sanskrit word for “neurosis” is klesha, and in Tibetan it is nyönmong. Nyön means “stuffiness.” Lots of stuffiness leads us to neurosis—is neurosis, in fact. In whatever we do, we experience nyönmong: when we scratch ourselves, it is nyönmong; when we eat our food, it is nyönmong; when we sit on the toilet seat, it is nyönmong; and when we smile at each other, it is nyönmong. Since we experience a sense of freakiness and unwholesomeness continuously in our ordinary life, we may begin to feel that we are being cheated. If we are theists, we get angry at God, thinking that God has cheated us; if we are nontheists, we blame karma. In either case, we feel we have been cheated by somebody, somewhere. So we begin to be resentful and doubtful, and we find that sitting on our meditation cushion is painful.

There is no relief or relaxation when we are in the samsaric world; there is always some kind of struggle going on. Even when we are supposedly enjoying life, there is still struggle and all kinds of discomfort. We may try to solve that problem by going out to restaurants or the cinema, or by enjoying our friends; nonetheless, nothing really helps. That is what is called the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. Seemingly we are trapped without hope or any way out. And once we are in that situation, we are always in that situation: we are in pain all the time. The Buddha’s teachings do not tell us how to skip out of that pain or how to abandon it; they only say that we have to understand our state of being. The more we understand our state of being, the more we will understand why we are in pain. What we find is that the more into ourselves we are, the more we suffer, and the less into ourselves we are, the less we suffer.

Since we yearn to cure our anxiety, we are always looking for potential pleasure, but that search in itself is painful. Whenever we look for pleasure, it is always painful pleasure. Without fail, the end result is completely painful. That search for pleasure is the illogic, or bad logic, of samsaric existence. Suppose you become rich, a millionaire—along with that you collect the anxiety of losing your money, so now that you are a millionaire, you are even more anxious. Situations like that happen all the time.

Regarding pleasure from the point of view of pain is a kind of animal instinct. It is the instinct of the lower realms existing within the human situation. If you do not have the reference point of pain, you cannot seem to enjoy anything. For instance, you might have bought a bottle of wine for three thousand dollars. Very painfully, you spent your three thousand dollars on this bottle of wine. So you say, “This is such fine aged wine. I paid all this money for it. Now let us have a good occasion!” But instead, it becomes a painful occasion. You worry, “What if somebody doesn’t appreciate his sip of wine?” We call this “nouveau-riche samsara.” Samsara is nouveau riche—it is crazy and stupid, without any dignity, and it goes on all the time.

Unless we realize the facts of life, we cannot begin to practice dharma. Being in the heat is what allows us to enjoy swimming; being in the cold is what allows us to wear nice woolen clothes. Those contradictions are natural; there is nothing extraordinary about them. Basically, we are in pain, we are suffering. Sometimes we become accustomed to our suffering, and sometimes we miss our suffering, so we deliberately invite more suffering. That is the samsaric way to exist.

The Buddhist path begins with the hinayana, which, in terms of the three-yana (or three-vehicle) journey, could be referred to as the “small vehicle” or the “immediate vehicle.” The hinayana is very practical, very pragmatic. It begins with the truth of suffering: we all suffer. We rediscover that suffering or anxiety again and again. During sitting practice, that anxiety might take the form of wanting to slip into a higher level of practice, using meditation as a kind of transcendental chewing gum. During daily life, you might find that samsaric misery in your neighborhood and in your immediate surroundings; it may be connected with your relatives, your best friends, your job, or your world. Wherever you look, anxiety is always there. Your personal anxiety is what stops you from cleaning your dishes; it is what stops you from folding your shirts properly or combing your hair. Anxiety prevents you from having a decent life altogether: you are distracted by it and constantly hassled. Whether those hassles are sociological, scientific, domestic, or economic, such anxiety is very painful and always present.

Every day seems to be different; nonetheless, every day seems to be exactly the same in terms of anxiety. Basic anxiety is taking place in your everyday life all the time. When you wake up and look around, you might think of coffee or food or taking a shower; but the minute you have had your coffee or your breakfast, you realize that the anxiety is still there. In fact, anxiety is always there, hovering and haunting you throughout your life. Even though you might be extremely successful, or so-called successful, at whatever your endeavors might be, you are always anxious about something or other. You can’t actually put your finger on it, but it is always there.

Seeing our pain as it is, is a tremendous help. Ordinarily, we are so wrapped up in it that we don’t even see it. We are swimming in oceans of ice water of anxiety, and we don’t even see that we are suffering. That is the most fundamental stupidity. Buddhists have realized that we are suffering, that anxiety is taking place. We have understood that anxiety does exist; and because of that, we also begin to realize the possibility of salvation or deliverance from that particular pain and anxiety.

According to the hinayana teachings, you have to be very practical: you are going to do something about suffering. On a very personal level, you are going to do something about it. To begin with, you could give up your scheme of what you ideally want in your life. Pleasure, enjoyment, happiness—you could give up those possibilities altogether. In turn, you could try to be kind to others, or at least stop inconveniencing others. Your existence might cause pain to somebody—you could try to stop causing that pain. As for yourself, if you find your anxiety and your desire comfortable, you could make sure that you question that perspective. In doing so, there is room for humor. As you begin to see the kind of communication that goes on between pain and pleasure, you begin to laugh. If you have too much pleasure, you can’t laugh; if you have too much pain, you can’t laugh; but when you are on the threshold of both pain and pleasure, you laugh. It is like striking a match.

The main point of the first noble truth is to realize that you do have such anxiousness in your being. You might be a great scholar and know the Buddhist path from top to bottom, including all the terminology—but you yourself are still suffering. You still experience basic anxiety. Look into that! At this point, we are not talking about an antidote or how to overcome that anxiety—the first thing is just to see that you are anxious. On the one hand, this is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, as the British say, or like teaching a bird how to fly; on the other hand, you really have to understand samsara. You are in samsara and you actually have to realize that.

Before you have been taught about samsara, you have no idea where you are; you are so absorbed in it that there is no reference point. Now that we are providing a reference point, look at what you are doing. Look at where you are and what you are in the midst of. That is a very important message. It is the beginning of the best enlightened message that could ever come about. At the level of vajrayana we might talk about the non-duality of samsara and nirvana, or fundamental wakefulness, or the flash of instantaneous liberation—but whatever we might talk about is concentrated in this very, very ordinary message: you have to review where you are. It might be a somewhat depressing prospect to realize that you are so thoroughly soaked in this greasy, heavy, dark, and unpleasant thing called samsara, but that realization is tremendously helpful. That understanding alone is the source of realizing what we call buddha in the palm of your hand—the basic wakefulness already in your possession. Such vajrayana possibilities begin at this point, right here, in realizing your samsaric anxiousness. Understanding that anxiety, which is very frustrating and not so good, is the key to realizing where you are.

The only way to work with this anxiety is the sitting practice of meditation, the taming of your mind, or shamathapractice. That is the basic idea of pratimoksha, or “individual liberation”: taming yourself. The way to tame yourself, or to talk yourself out of this particular anxiety, is through the concentrated practice of shamatha discipline. The beginning of the beginning of the path of buddhadharma is about how you can actually save yourself from samsaric neurosis. You have to be very careful; you are not yet up to saving others.