Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [36]
Buddha Dharma does not teach that everything is suffering. What Buddhism does say is that life, by its nature, is difficult, flawed, and imperfect. For most of us, this fact of life hardly merits a news flash. Who among us has a perfect life? Of course we would like it to be delightful and wonderful all the time. But it’s not going to happen. That’s the nature of life, and that’s the First Noble Truth. From a Buddhist point of view, this is not a judgment of life’s joys or sorrows; this is a simple, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact description. The fact is that we will all experience ups and downs no matter who we are. That’s part of the roller-coaster ride. Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic; it is realistic.
For a moment, let’s stop and think about the First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha from the Buddha’s point of view. As a child and young adult, he was protected from the facts of life—the facts of illness, death, unhappiness, and poverty. In his father’s palace, totally sheltered from reality, he was taught that his riches, his beauty, his physical prowess, and his power would protect him from any hardship.
On a visceral level, the Buddha must have always realized that the world was filled with suffering no matter how much his father tried to shield him from reality. It’s interesting to note that the Buddha’s mother died within weeks of giving birth, and Buddha must have had questions about what had happened to her, but those questions were never answered. Modern psychologists might even say that the Buddha was raised to be in denial. We all know that denial is the psychological defense system we use to protect ourselves when the truth seems too painful to bear. As he matured, the Buddha didn’t want that kind of insulation from reality. He recognized that no matter how many possessions or how much power he had, ultimately he would not be able to avoid life’s inherent problems. No one can.
Like all of us, the Buddha was challenged by his own attachment to worldly values. An essential part of his path to freedom was to put those values in perspective and recognize any residual clinging he might have to worldly pleasures. He had to break through the obscurations of delusion—his own denial—and see the reality of conditioned existence, known as samsara, with all its inherent shortcomings. For all of us, this is an essential part of the path to enlightenment: Awaken your innate, inner Buddha; break through the denial systems in your life; see through the veils of illusion; recognize who and what you truly are; and know the truth of things exactly as they are.
The Buddha broke down life’s problems into three separate categories of dukkha, or difficulties.
1. Ordinary, Everyday Difficulties or Dukkha
You don’t always get what you think you want, and that makes most people feel unhappy at least some of the time. If you are born, you are eventually bound to experience both physical and emotional pain. Birth, aging, illness, loss, grieving, as well as disappointments happen to every single one of us. This isn’t all bad. We can learn a great deal from the problems, both large and small, that we experience. Everyday problems teach us to have a realistic attitude. They teach us that life is what life is: flawed, yet with tremendous potential for joy and fulfillment. Everything is workable. Until we fully learn this lesson, we are burned time and again by our unrealistic expectations.
One of the Buddha’s most famous sermons is known as the Fire Sermon. In it, he said that we are all afire with uncontrolled passions that consume and dominate our lives. Because of these passions, we are like children in burning houses. We don’t have the maturity or the self-mastery to recognize our situation and swiftly douse those fires. We must grow up and learn how to be mature and liberated adults, who understand the nature of reality. Balloons break, love