Three Causes of 'Suffering'

To the unenlightened mind, the Buddha explained, life is duhkha, a Pali term customarily translated as 'suffering." From this First Noble Truth - the truth of suffering - flow the rest of the Buddha's teachings. But what does duhkha really signify?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Buddhism:

"There is no word in English covering the same ground as duhkha in the sense it is used in Buddhism. The usual translation of 'suffering' is too strong, and gives the impression that life according to Buddhism is nothing but pain. As a consequence, some regard Buddhism as pessimistic."

"While duhkha certainly embraces the ordinary meaning of 'suffering,' it also includes deeper concepts such as impermanence (anitya) and unsatisfactoriness, and may be better left untranslated. The Buddha does not deny happiness in life, although this too is seen as part of duhkha because of its impermanence."

"The concept of duhkha is explained as having three aspects. Ordinary duhkha (duhkha-duhkha) refers to all kinds of suffering in life, such as illness, death, separation from loved ones, or not getting what one desires. The second aspect of duhkha, or duhkha produced by change (viparinama-duhkha) is the duhkha resulting from the impermanent nature of all things. The third aspect of duhkha, or duhkha as conditioned states (samskara-duhkha), is the most important philosophical aspect of the First Noble Truth. This teaches that what we call an 'individual' is, according to Buddhism, a combination of ever-changing physical and mental forces known as the 'five aggregates, (panca skandha). This is known as the doctrine of anatman, or no-self."

"(L)ike everything else," it is noted, "the individual ego is dependently originated and conditioned. Holding to the illusion of an independently originated self (atman), according to the Buddha, makes one crave for the satisfaction of this self. However, since everything is duhkha, and impermanent, there cannot be enduring satisfaction. Instead, craving (trsna) only leads to a vicious circle of unfulfilled, desires, and therefore more suffering (duhkha)."

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The first aspect of 'suffering' - duhkha-duhkha - is the most readily apparent aspect: hit your thumb with a hammer, develop arthritis, grow sick and die, and the inevitable result is suffering, both mental and physical. This might be called 'ordinary suffering.'

The second aspect of suffering - duhkha produced by change (viparinama-duhkha) - is somewhat more subtle, yet still very easy to grasp. Picture yourself on a paradaisical beach. Everything is beautiful and perfect. Then the thought arises that your vacation will end on Saturday and you will have to return to work and your 'normal' life. Suffering ensues. It ensues irrespective of whether we realize that we may not get something that we crave, or whether we realize that we may (or will) inevitably lose something that we cling to. Under these conditions, even that which is pleasurable causes the experience of suffering, albeit suffering produced by change - or viparinama-duhkha. This might be called "the suffering of impermanence."

The third aspect of suffering (samskara-duhkha) - suffering caused by the illusion that the ego-self is not conditioned or learned, but rather is actually 'who' and 'what' we are - is yet more subtle. Because of this mistaken illusion, we try to satisfy the ego's desires and allay its fears, but are ultimately unable to do so, as the ego itself is illusory. It is the ego-self that we mistake with our ultimate being - the Atman - a reality that is obscured by the conditioned states and thought patterns of the ego. This might be called "existential suffering."

To understand samskara-duhkha, it is perhaps helpful to examine what is meant by the 'samskaras' - a term that evolved, as did Buddhism, from the Vedic teachings of India.

In his masterpiece commentary on Patanjali's yoga aphorisms ("How to Know God"), Swami Prabhavananda asks us to picture the mind as a lake. The surface of the lake is our conscious thinking, while the water column is the 'thought-stuff' of the mind, and the lake bottom is the Atman, the Godhead within each of us. In its perfect state the waters of this mind-lake are purified and clear and one can easily percieve the Atman, which is the Ground of Being. However, as the 'thought-stuff' of the mind is distrubed, the water gets murky and turgid and the Atman is no longer discernible.

Over time, our habitual thought patterns flow and eddy in particular forms, building up sand banks and pebble beds which both obscure the lake bottom and channel the water to run in certain directions. Prabhavananda identifies these obscurations as the samskaras. In our consciousness we identify with our samskaras (or thought-patterns) and lose all contact with our Ground of Being, the Atman. Thus, a person who is habitually involved with thoughts of those who have 'wronged' him, plotting revenge, becomes a resentful man. A person who habitually thinks anger thoughts becomes an angry man etc.

Even as we learn to still the thought waves in the mind through the practice of meditation and contemplation, the samskaras remain as obstacles to realizing 'who' and 'what' we are and achieving union with our Ground of Being. But, as time passes, and with disciplined practice, even the sandbanks and pebble beds of the samskaras will begin to dissipate.

No longer sustained and built up by our habitual, egoic thinking the samskaras fade in time, and once again we can see from our consciousness through the water-column of the mind to the Atman at the base. But, in the meantime, if we habitually identify with our samskaras as being 'who' and 'what' we are, we suffer. Like all other 'things,' our false ego-self is a product of dependent origination. If we can realize its impermanence and cease to identify with it we begin to overcome our samskara-duhkha.

Maya, Existence and Non-Existence

"When the Hindu says the world is Maya, at once people get the idea that the world is an illusion. This interpretation has some basis, as coming through the Buddhistic philosophers, because there was one section of philosophers who did not believe in the external world at all. But the Maya of Vedanta, in its last developed form is neither Idealism nor Realism, nor is it a theory. It is a simple statement of facts - what we are, and what we see around us."

"The one peculiar attribute we find in time, space, and causation is that they cannot exist sepearte from other things. Try to think of space without colour, or limits, or any connection with the things around - just abstract space. You cannot; you have to think of it as the space between two limits, or between three objects. It has to be connected with some object to have any existence. So with time; you cannot have any ideas of abstract time, but you have to take two events, one preceding, and the other succeeding, and join the two events by the ideas of succession. Time depends on two events, just as space has to be related to outside objects. And the idea of causation is inseparable from time and space."

"As no man can jump out of his own self, so no man can go beyond the limits that have been put upon him by the laws of time and space. Every attempt to solve the laws of causation, time and space, would be futile, because the very attempt would have to be made by taking for granted the existence of these things."

"What does the statement of the existence of the world mean, then? "This world has no existence." What is meant by that? It means that it has no absolute existence. It exists only in relation to my mind, to your mind, and to the mind of everyone else."

"We see this world with the five senses, but if we had another sense, we would see in it something more. If we had yet another sense, it would appear to be as something still different. It has, therefore, no real existence; it has no unchangeable, immovable, infinite existence. Nor can it be called non-existence, seeing that it exists, and we have to work in and through it. It is a misture of existence and non-existence."

-- Swami Vivikenanda --
("Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," Advaita Ashrama Publishings, pp. 198-199.)

The Bhagavad Gita: Beyond the Three Gunas

"There are men who have no vision, and yet they speak many words. They follow the letter of the Vedas, and they say: 'There is nothing but this.'

Their soul is wrapped with selfish desires, and their heaven is a selfish desire. They have prayers for pleasure and power, the reward of which is earthly rebirth.

Those who love pleasure and power hear and follow their words: they have not the determination ever to be one with the One.

The three Gunas of Nature are the world of the Vedas. Arise beyond the three Gunas, Arjuna! Beyond gains and possessions, possess thine own soul."

-- Bhagavad Gita, II:42-45 --

In Samkhya philosophy, there are three major guṇas that serve as the fundamental operating principles or 'tendencies' of Prakṛiti (or, universal nature) which are called: sattva, rajas, and tamas. The three primary gunas are generally accepted to be associated with creation (rajas), preservation (sattva), and destruction (tamas). The entire creation and its process of evolution is carried out by these three major gunas, as explained below.

[Source: Wikipedia.]

To "be without the three gunas" is what the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi called "the technique of instantaneous realization." It is, he said, "a practical way of converging the many-branched mind into the one-pointedness of the resolute intellect," and "an effective technique for bringing the mind to a state where all differences dissolve and leave the individual in the state of fulfillment."

In urging him to "arise beyond the three gunas," Krishna is (according to the Maharishi) telling Arjuna "that all influences of the outside world, and their consequences as well, will cling to him and affect him so long as he is out of himself, so long as he allows himself to remain in the sphere of relativity and under its influence, (and) that once out of that sphere, he will find fulfillment in his own Self." In this way, he will transcend his karma, and fulfill his destiny.

[Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "The Bhagavad-Gita : A New Translation and Commentary," p. 90.]

Sri Ramakrishna
(1836-1886)

In "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna," the sayings and teachings of the 19th century Indian saint, Ramakrishna observes that "(u)nder the spell of God's maya, man forgets his true nature. He forgets that he is heir to the infinite glories of of his Father."

"The mind," he points out, "is made up of  three gunas. And all three are robbers, for they rob man of all his treasures and make him forget his own nature. The three gunas are sattva, rajas, and tamas. Of these, sattva alone points the way to God, but even sattva cannot take a man to God."

To illustrate this point, Sri Ramakrishna tells the following story:

"Once a rich man was passing through a forest, when three robbers surrounded him and robbed him of everything he had. Then one of the robbers said: 'What's the good of keeping this man alive? Kill him.' He was about to strike their victim with his sword, when the second robber intervened and said: 'There's no use in killing him. Let us bind him fast and leave him here. Then he won't be able to tell the police.' Accordingly, the robbers tied him with a rope and went away."

"After a while the third robber returned to the rich man and said: 'Ah! You're badly hurt, aren't you? Come, I'm going to release you.' The robber set the man free and led him to the edge of the forest. When they came near the highway, the robber said, 'Follow this road and you will reach home easily.' 'But you must come with me too,' said the rich man. 'You have done so much for me. All my people will be happy to see you.' 'No,' said the robber, 'it is not possible for me to go there. The police will arrest me.' So saying, he left the rich man after pointing the way."

"Now," explains Ramakrishna, "the first robber, who said: What's the good of keeping the man alive? Kill him,' is tamas. It destroys. The second robber is rajas, which binds a man to the world and entangles him in a variety of activities. Rajas makes him forget God. Sattva alone shows the way to God. It produces virtues like compassion, righteousness and devotion. Again, sattva is like the last step of the stairs. Next to it the roof. The Supreme Brahman is man's own abode. One cannot attain the Knowledge of Brahman unless one transcends the three gunas."

["The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Abridged Edition),"pp. 254-255.]

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Prakriti, "the elemental, undifferentiated stuff of mind and matter" of which the cosmos is made, is eternally inseparable from Brahman (or God, the Ultimate, the Ground of Being), and it is composed of the three gunas, or tendencies.

"In the process of evolution," Swami Prahavananda (a monk of the Ramakrishna Order) explains, "sattwa is the essence of the form which has to be realized, tamas is the inherent obstacle to its realization, and rajas is the power by which that obstacle is removed and the essential form made manifest."

"These gunas," Prabhavananda elaborates, "pass through phases of equilibrium and phases of imbalance; the nature of their relationship to each other is such that it is subject to perpetual change. As long as the gunas maintain their equilibrium, Prakriti remains undifferentiated and the universe only exists in its potential state. As soon as the balance is disturbed, a re-creation of the universe begins. The gunas enter into an enormous variety of combinations - all of them irregular, with one or the other guna predominating over the rest. Hence we have the variety of physical and psychic phenomena which make up our apparent world. Such a world continues to multiply and vary its forms until the gunas find a temporary equilibrium once more, and a new phase of undifferentiated potentiality begins."

[Prabhavananda and Isherwood, "How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," pp. 36-37.]

Thus, to be self-realized and to abide in the Godhead, one must "arise beyond the three gunas" as Krishna advises Arjuna in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, as it is only in facing and transcending the gunas that one reaches moksha, liberation or enlightenment, and finds abiding peace.

On Duality, Dependent Origination and Emptiness

"The consciousness that perceives each thing as existing separately is false. Actually, nothing exists in this way. When we set out to investigate things on this basis, the more deeply we look into objects and concepts, the more they dissolve."

-- H.H., the XIVth Dalai Lama --
("Essential Teachings")

There is, the Buddha said, nothing that is in and of itself separate, everything is infinitely divisible. As much as this seems particularly relevant to science today, as physicists probe ever more deeply into the sub-particular, microcosmic world of such exotic entities as muons, gluons and quarks, it is still more relevant at the level of our everyday reality, where the vast majority of us go through life with the unchecked assumption that we are separate and individual actors on the global stage.

Albert Einstein, the father of the 'New Physics," called our sense of separation and separate existence "an optical delusion of consciousness" that imprisons us, and severs our connection with each other and the cosmos itself.

"A human being," he observed, "is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."

"This delusion," he remarked, "is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"The true value of a human being," he observed, "is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

(Albert Einstein, 1954)

In the attached video lecture on "duality" and the Advaita Vedanta, author Rupert Spira, examines how this "optical delusion of consciousness" arises, and how it effects the way we view ourselves and the world around us.

William James: Religious Experience and Higher Consciousness

Western science is just now coming face-to-face with the question of just 'what' consciousness is, although much of its work is still concentrated on the quest to find the neural correlates of consciousness - a sign that the scientific search is still for consciousness arising as a phenomenon of the brain, rather than as an independent phenomena. This, of course, indicates the Western bias for materialism.

William James
(1842-1910)

It is now over 100 years, however, since William James "threw down the gauntlet" (as Alan Wallace notes in a convincing Google TechTalk), challenging Western science to investigate just what "consciousness" is, and why there appear to be so many different forms - particularly higher forms -  of it. "

In his masterwork, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," James writes that: "(P)ersonal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness." And, describing the qualities of such higher states of consciousness, beyond our ordinary egoic, self-consciousness, he observes that "(t)hey are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time."

Moreover, he notes, "(m)ystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. . . . They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and feeling of an enlargement of perceptions which seems imminent but which never completes itself."

[Wm. James, "Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 379-384.]

Richard M. Bucke
(1837-1902)

Two of the examples he cites are from the Canadian psychiatrist, Richard M. Bucke (author of the renowned book, "Cosmic Consciousness"), and the great Indian teacher and spiritual ambassador to the West, Swami Vivikenanda.

Writing of his own experience of a higher, transcendental consciousness, Bucke observed:

"Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run guaranteed. The vision lasted but a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed."

[Ibid., p. 397.]

Swami Vivekananda
(1863-1902)

The Indian yogi, Swami Vivikenanda, burst onto the Western stage with his appearance at the  Parliament of the World's Religions, held at Chicago's World Fair in 1893 and exposed Westerners, most for the first time, to the millennia-old yoga (or religious) teachings of the East. Vivikenanda's views on transcendental consciousness were extracted by James, from Vivkenanda's famous work, "Raja Yoga," in which he observed:

"(T)he mind itself has a higher state of consciousness, beyond reason, and . . .  when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes. . . . All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samadhi. . . . Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the sense of egoism. . . . There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves - for Samadhi lies potential in us all - for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite and its contrasts of good and evil altogether and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul."

[Ibid., p. 400.]

When a man emerges from the experience of  Samadhi," James notes, "the Vedantists assure us that he remains "enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illiumined." The same conclusion is drawn of course by Bucke, and is a central tenet of his book, "Cosmic Consciousness."

All this goes to show, that the experience of individuals in the West and East (as amply demonstrated by both William James and Bucke) attests to higher states of transcendental consciousness beyond the mere egoic consciousness that the vast majority of us function and suffer (to greater or lesser degrees) in. Yet, it appears that Western-based science continues unabated in its attempt to find and map the neural correlates of these states of heightened consciousness, even while they have so far been unable to find the neural basis, or even come to a generally accepted working definition, of consciousness itself.

A video critique of William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" by the distinguished American philosopher, Richard Rorty, is included, below.