Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Local Yokels, Easy Rider; Ven. Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary; Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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| A trip across the real America |
The odd thing about our great America (and "the world" we generally call samsara) is that there's pain, you know, painful feeling, bodily and mental.
Aversion to that kind of disappointment, wanting it to be other than it is, gives us "suffering."
The woe and the ill come from not seeing things as they really are, which could and would liberate us.
But most of us stop at pain and immediately want to turn away from it, run away, escape, commit suicide, without having any idea of how to actually get away to overcome rebirth and the future misery that entails through countless births.
But most of us stop at pain and immediately want to turn away from it, run away, escape, commit suicide, without having any idea of how to actually get away to overcome rebirth and the future misery that entails through countless births.
Pain in all its forms is the first of the Four Noble Truths and the second of the Three Marks of Existence.
The Buddhist term for it, dukkha, is not limited to painful experience. It refers to the disappointing, unsatisfactory, unfulfilling nature of all things -- the general insecurity that accompanies all conditional phenomena.
On account of their instability, unreliability, impermanence, all things are liable to suffering. This includes also pleasurable experiences!
So "unsatisfactoriness" or "liability to disappointment" would be better ways of translating dukkha. There is plenty of pleasure. The first truth does not exclude that. (Why else would anybody hang around?) People often wrongly assume that Buddhism thinks there's no pleasure.
There's pleasure, there's wrong understanding, there's attaching, and with the loss of things we're attached to and unable to let go of, there's pain, crying, disappointment, and the entire mass of suffering.
SUTRA
This is illustrated by the following words of the Buddha: "Seeking satisfaction in the world, meditators, I pursued my way. Satisfaction in the world I found. Insofar as satisfaction exists in the world, I well perceived it by wisdom.
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| Pleasure, misery, escape? Escape is best! |
"Seeking misery in the world, meditators, I pursued my way. Misery in the world I found. Insofar as misery exists in the world, I well perceived it by wisdom.
"Seeking escape from the world, meditators, I pursued my way. Escape from the world I found. Insofar as an escape from the world exists, I well perceived it by wisdom" (A.iii.105).
"If there were no satisfaction [pleasure, joy, happiness] to be found in the world, living beings would not be attached to the world....
"If there were no misery to be found in the world, living beings would not be repelled by the world....
"Seeking escape from the world, meditators, I pursued my way. Escape from the world I found. Insofar as an escape from the world exists, I well perceived it by wisdom" (A.iii.105).
"If there were no satisfaction [pleasure, joy, happiness] to be found in the world, living beings would not be attached to the world....
"If there were no misery to be found in the world, living beings would not be repelled by the world....
"If there were no escape from the world, living beings could not escape from it" (A.iii.106). But there is, and they can. Nirvana is that escape, that freedom, that perfect bliss.
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