On "The Four Noble Truths"

Francis Story, The Four Noble Truths; Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Absorption then insight

Humankind, pondering and disputing, has been engaged for so long in trying to find an answer to the enigma of existence -- and so many first-class minds have been devoted to the task -- that had the problem been open to solution by the intellect alone, we should certainly have been furnished with the definitive blueprint of our being, beyond all doubt or conjecture, many centuries ago.

From the time when prehistoric myth became merged into an attempt to give a rational account of the universe the questions, "What is life? How did it originate? What is its purpose? Does it even have a purpose?" have haunted the imagination.

Yet, for most people such questions remain unanswered. Reason has offered a wide range of ingenious possibilities derived from unreliable speculation. But so far reason has failed to provide any reasonable explanation that is not open to equally reasonable objections. And while reason has failed, its alternative -- supernatural revelation -- has shown itself equally contradictory and inconclusive.

It has suffered an even worse defeat. Its historical record has weighed heavily against it because of the disastrous influence it has often exerted in human affairs. The private revelations of mystics, by their exclusively subjective nature, can never offer more than an insecure foothold for faith in those who have not directly shared them. A doubtful faith is the father of fanaticism.

The record of humankind’s speculative thought down the centuries has come to resemble a maze of tracks in a boundless desert. The tracks can be identified by their characteristics; they are the tracks of religion, of philosophy, and obliterating many of these, the more recent tracks of science. For the most part the tracks of religion go round in circles. Beginning as myth they continue as myth hardened into dogma, and so go over the same ground in endless repetition.

The Net of All-Embracing Views

When we examine the sixty-two views or theories (diṭṭhis) on the nature of life and the universe, which were current in the time of the historical Buddha and described by him in the "Net of All-Embracing Views" (Brahmajāla Sutra of the Collection of Long Discourses or Dīgha Nikaya), we find there the seeds of all later thought, the archetype of every idea that has appeared in philosophy between Plotinus and Kierkegaard.

That some of them were the doctrines of established schools that had been in existence long before the birth of the Buddha is evident from the accounts of the Buddha’s own search for enlightenment. For on renouncing the world, the prince who became an ascetic, Siddhartha, first placed himself under two teachers from among the many sects that were already laying claim to ultimate knowledge.

Those teachers, Ālāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, were not logicians but exponents of the meditative absorptions (jhanas, dhyanas) and yoga. As such they had their philosophy, but its final vindication was to be sought in the subjective realm, in an intensified perception outside the scope of formal reasoning.

By the practice of jhāna, or meditative absorption, they had in fact succeeded in raising consciousness to a higher power.

But great as were the achievements of these two eminent yogis, the ascetic Siddhartha did not find the full enlightenment he sought through their spiritual systems. Neither did he reach it by way of the extreme asceticism to which he later turnedr. He found, on the contrary, that an entirely new mode of approach was needed if he were to break through the thicket, the tangle of conceptual thinking on the one hand, and sublimated consciousness on the other.

By the traditional yogic methods, he had gone beyond the world of forms, but not beyond that of ideas or the mere suspension of ideas. He found that the degree of illumination these methods gave was far from that of absolute knowledge and liberation. Thrown back on his own resources, with no longer any guiding principle except what he might find within himself, he returned in thought to the original impulse of his quest.

Its beginning, significantly enough, lay in a very early experience he had known, of an intuitive kind. He had been sitting watching his father, the king, carrying out the ritual of the spring ploughing. His attention had been caught and held by the flocks of birds that followed in the wake of the plough. They were eagerly scratching in the newly-turned furrows for worms and insects. Driven by hunger, the all-demanding hankering that is ever present in nature, and excited by the sight of their living prey, birds of all kinds were quarrelling and fighting one another, a noisy, turbulent mass of feathered bodies, striking and tearing at one another with beak and claw.

It was a common enough sight, and one that carries no special meaning for most. But to the young Siddhattha, it had been a troubling experience. It would be to anyone who believes in an overruling power, a creator god, whose chief attribute is love.

Birds—among the most delicate and beautiful of nature’s offspring, creatures so light and ethereal that when man thinks of spiritual beings it is with the wings of birds and something of their morning ecstasy that he pictures them—those same birds that have been the poet’s inspiration and the nature lover’s joy, at close quarters are seen to be fully as rapacious and as cruel towards smaller creatures and to their owns species as the most ferocious of the larger animals. By such a slight transformation the winged angel becomes the winged tiger.

Yet, as the young Siddhattha saw even then, it could not be otherwise. Birds had to satisfy the urge to live, and for their food they had to prey on others and compete with others. So it was throughout nature, and from whatever particular the generalization was drawn it expanded into the same universal truth. Not only is nature indifferent to cruelty and pain, but it actually imposes them upon all living creatures as the condition and price of their existence. To inflict or to suffer; or both to inflict and to suffer—that is the law of life....

So he turned his mind back to that incident in early life, which had shown him his true path, to the glimpse he had had of a knowledge he possessed before any tradition claimed him. After his enlightenment, the Buddha described it in these words:

“I recalled how once I was seated under the shade of a jambu tree while my father, [King] Suddhodana, was ploughing the royal furrow, and having put aside desires and impure states of mind, yet cognizing and reflecting in the bliss born of detachment, I attained the first meditative absorption. Could it be that this was the way to realization? With that thought the clear consciousness came to me: ’Yes, indeed, this is the way to realization.’”

The path of absorption

The first meditative absorption (jhāna) is reached by purifying and tranquilizing the mind/heart, which can be done by the practice of ānāpāna-sati, mindfulness of in-and-out breathing. This state of tranquility is accompanied by joy and rapture. In this absorption, refined and calmed initial application of mind and sustained attention are still present though no longer engaged with a multitude of objects. They exclusively attend to the object of meditation.

Having risen from that absorption, the mind will be calm and concentrated. And because it is no longer disturbed by desires of the more active kind, it becomes able to examine the factors of experience with detachment. One enjoys a new clarity of perception. It is as if the rippled surface of a pool became smooth and still. When this happens two things follow, the surface reflects external things accurately, and at the same time it becomes possible to see through the surface to the depths below. More