impermanence

The first noble truth is that everything is dukkha.

Dukkha refers to the transient nature of all things, as well as the fact that suffering is unavoidable.

The traditional formulation is:

“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

That the body is subject to change is not in doubt. We can see it in the mirror on a daily basis. We can see it in our relatives as they age, in our children as they grow, in the sink after we cut our nails or hair. We can see it in how our diet impacts our body shape which impacts our mental formation of our beauty which impacts our idea of how others view us which impacts how we eat once more.

The middleaged with their attempts to retain their youth and the elderly with their attempts to retain their memories. The man in his prime who harks on about when he was the leader of his school football team; these are all examples of people who are causing themselves suffering by trying to deny the simple fact that everything has changed and those times are behind them. They are attached to a mental formation which no longer exists.

Even the experience of nibbana is transient, never mind the experience of the jhānas. You need to be able to let them both go in order to achieve true liberation.

birth is suffering

I don’t think he was talking about physical childbirth here, though that no doubt meets the criteria. I think he was talking about the craving which is caused by contact with a sense-pleasure; usually a mental formation.

You are perfectly happy as you are until you see a magazine full of beautiful people and think ‘these are pleasing to my eye’ and decide you also want to be pleasing to the eye. This is the birth of a self-image, to which you develop a craving, and this craving causes suffering because the reality is not the same as the ideal.

You encounter a beautiful person on the street and crave to have them as your partner or your possession. Before you encountered the person you had no craving, and you are reborn as someone with a craving for them. You form a relationship and are reborn as someone who wants to hold onto that relationship. They leave you and you are reborn as someone who has lost that which they craved. Or the person changes, or you change, and the old mental formations no longer line up.

You are perfectly happy and then you try a cigarette or some alcohol or some cocaine and you are reborn as someone who craves a mind-state induced by a substance. You are who you are and then you go to a doctor and get labelled with various ‘pathologies’ just for being a little off the bell-curve, and you are reborn as someone who either embraces or rejects these things. These are all forms of rebirth and all forms of suffering.

aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering

The first two are straightforward and guaranteed to happen to us all. The third is multi-layered. Physical death probably isn’t nice but I think the most poignant is the death of a self-image. We all know someone who is beyond their prime: they won some races or some awards or they were billy big balls in their sector for a while, and despite it being decades past, it’s all they can talk about. This is suffering. They are in pain.

union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering;

These are also straightforward.

in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

This is more complicated and comes back to the fact that there is no permanent self, which I will talk about in another article. The buddha never could identify an axis around which our person revolves; never could find an eternal soul. Everything is constantly changing - our consciousness, memories, drives, physical sensations, body, emotions.

These aggregates are form (physical body), feeling (pleasant/unpleasant), perception (sensing, including memory with the mind), formation (intention, desire, imagination) and consciousness (where your awareness falls). 

All of these are subject to craving. We crave physical wellness and freedom from sickness. We crave presence of the pleasant and absence of the unpleasant. We crave the ability to see or hear or cognise something more or less. We crave certain patterns of thought, and we even crave craving itself, or freedom from it; people asking me how I was so motivated while I just wished I could stop. We crave the ability to keep our consciousness on the pleasant instead of the unpleasant.

All of these things are always changing. Nothing is ever still. There is no permanence. This is the first noble truth. 

These things will always change. We will lose the pleasant, acquire the unpleasant, get old, get sick, and die. Our past selves are gone and our future selves may never come to be.

This is the way of the world. And the reason we suffer is not because of ‘dukkha’ itself.

The etymological root of dukkha is

du- = “bad,” “difficult”

-kha = “axle-hole” or “wheel hub”

A helpful way of thinking of it is that the wheel of life will always be wobbly. The wheel of life for a monk or an arahant (fully enlightened one) is wobbly too.

The key is to try to become comfortable with the bumpy ride by lowering your dvar and lowering your craving.

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