Overcoming Suffering

John Fullerton* (GingerAsia.com)

Occasionally someone will ask what Buddhism is about. One might say "Buddhism is about understanding suffering and overcoming it" or "Buddhism is about self-liberation."

Perhaps the next step would be to explain the framework espoused in the Buddha’s first sermon. This framework is known as the Four Ennobling (or Noble) Truths: namely,

1. our lives and the world we inhabit are infused with suffering (dukkha);
2. anguish is caused by craving;
3. the cure to this problem lies in the cessation of craving;
4. there exists a Path that leads to awakening and hence to the cessation of suffering.

Buddhists distinguish three arenas of dukkha ["unsatisfactoriness"]: First, there is the untidy business of living, that is, mental and physical pain. Second, there is change and impermanence or the sense that whatever I enjoy will inevitably end. Third, there is the limited nature of all things arising from conditions.

Suffering can be broken down into the "fires" or causes and conditions of delusion, greed, and hatred as well as the painfulness of birth, aging, and death.

Suffering arises because the mundane self is in reality anattā or "not-self." There is no permanent, unconditioned self. The personality is a construct, a flow of habitual ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. It is a moment-to-moment series of phenomena, experiences, or dhammas ["things"].

All phenomena (except for nirvana), including the mundane "me," arise from conditions and causes. Insofar as phenomena exist, they do so only in terms of their interdependence on causes and supporting conditions. More>>

• John Fullerton is a well known freelance writer and a practicing Buddhist. He divides his time between Thailand and Britain.