As of today, Love of All Wisdom is one year old; the blog went officially online on 1 June 2009. To commemorate the occasion I’ve added a list of “favourite posts” to the sidebar. These are five posts from the past year that I consider particularly successful: they got a fascinating discussion going, attracted new readers to the blog, and helped me think through my own views more deeply. If you’re relatively new to the blog, have a look.
But more importantly than any new widget, I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to all my readers who have followed my philosophical interests this year. And an extra special thank you to everyone who has left a comment and enriched the wonderful, lively and growing discussions going on here. Without all of you readers, the blog is no more than another personal journal of mine, and I have more than enough of those offline. Thank you all very much, and here’s to many more years.
Happy Birthday!
I enjoyed your post on the four noble truths — but disagree with your views.
An interesting observation about the four noble truths — one that was noted in a commentary by the Fourth Dalai Lama — is the order of the truths. From the point of view of logic, the order of the truths would more appropriately be based on cause and effect. The first two truths dealing with samsara would more appropriately be arranged as cause of suffering and then result, truth of suffering. Then, similarly, the third and fourth truths would, logically, be path and cessation of suffering.
But the order of the truths is important to the understanding of the truths and highlights Buddhism as a practice tradition rather than exclusively as an intellectual tradition and also as a non-theistic rather than a theistic tradition. The Fourth Dalai Lama observed that the first and second noble truths arise in that order because that is the order that the truths arise in our experience. It is like a person who is walking down the street who is suddenly drenched by ice water — he experiences suffering and then turns to find the cause. Buddhism is a practice tradition. That is why the first noble truth is “there is suffering” or “suffering exists” — not “everything is suffering”. “Everything is suffering” is too conclusory and abstract.
The order of the truths also illustrates why Buddhism is non-dogmatic and non-theistic. If we could say “everything is suffering” or order the second noble truth before the first, we would be creating an abstract philosophical system. Instead, Buddhism is based on experience. As Chogyam Trungpa said, Buddhism is based on “seeing and then looking”, not on “looking and then seeing”. In other words, we experience suffering and then investigate to find the cause. If we accepted the cause first, our religion would be based on an abstraction — we would have an eternal truth and a theistic religion.
Similarly, with regard to the third and fourth noble truths, we have cessation of suffering before path. This is because, in our experience cessation of suffering is known before the path is begun. It is the inspiration for the path. The path is an unraveling of habit that gradually allows stability of realization. But Buddha nature is inate and uncreated. Poets experience and describe this. When W.C. Williams says “only in isolate flecks is something given off; no one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car” — he is describing enlightenment as well as the egolessness necessary to the experience. The “isolate fleck” quality of this experience is the third noble truth. The fourth noble truth is the path that stabilizes enlightenment into realization or Buddhahood.
I would only add as a final comment — of course enlightenment can be achieved in one life! In fact, it can only be achieved right now!
Thanks, Jim. There were a couple of interesting followup posts to that one here and here, both of which had long and interesting comment threads. On the second one Justin Whitaker makes the important point you do, that the First Noble Truth is not “all is suffering.” On the other hand, looking back at the texts, one realizes it is not merely “suffering exists.” Rather, the five aggregates which make up our clinging, conditioned experience are all suffering. We only find things that are not suffering when we get to what is not conditioned by clinging, namely nirvana.
Which is to say that the path, at least on an early Buddhist understanding, does indeed come before the end of suffering in our experience. But you raise an important objection to such a claim: why then does the end come before the path as the truths are listed? I think the order of the truths is something similar to experience but distinct from it: it is a dialectical ordering. That is, it’s the order in which we need to think about the truths in order to understand them. It’s only once we have heard that there is an end to suffering that we need to get on the path. But that doesn’t mean we have already experienced the end to suffering, else there is no need to get on the path.
This is my understanding, and I think it is entirely in line with the vast majority of Indian Buddhist thought, early, Theravāda and Mahāyāna. But it is specifically a “gradual path” understanding, and I think in that respect it is at odds with the “sudden path” view most popular in East Asia, and having some traction in Tibet. I have yet to meet anyone who I think is awakened (/enlightened) in this life; I have met some people who are further along the path than others.