Buddhist Philosophy Basics
Life Is Suffering: A Real or Fake Buddhist Trope?
Addressing the Most Common Half-Truth Circulated about the Buddha’s Ministry
Buddhism = Pessimism?
If you ask the average person to name one thing they know about Buddhism, one of the two or three things they are likely to choose among is “Life is suffering. Buddhism is high-class pessimism.”
This sort of oversimplification that leads to ideas more incorrect than correct, and generally worse than useless to understanding Buddhism.
First Issue: Buddhism was categorically transformed twice, with many sub-revolutions in between them.
The first problem with isolating this First Noble Truth is that it muddles all forms, schools, and iterations of “Buddhism”, and in turn their treatment of the Noble Truths as a teaching. Early Indian Buddhism is particular, unique, and narrow: its interior logic must be entirely transformed to allow for even the possibility of something like lay (much less secular) or multicultural Buddhism. The initial teachings are seen as a sort of anchor and “catalyst” to more nuanced and sophisticated teachings, so that the initial dictate that “life is dukkha” [the Pali word of which “suffering” is a lumpy translation] is just one of the things turned on its head as the life raft which Buddhism is expands to take on more individuals and methods.
Second Issue: Dukkha is More Nuanced Than Simply “Suffering”
The second problem is the translation itself. “Dukkha” is not suffering, per se, but only an acute sense of incompletion. Dukkha is the vague, soft lull of ennui and boredom as much as it is the pain of a broken bone. The First Noble Truth is that by itself, naked unaltered life leads to dissatisfaction. Some change, some transition is necessary for spiritual welfare — early and later Buddhists differ on whether this necessary change means an erasure of life altogether or something which can recontextualize and resacralize it as it is.
But in either case, dukkha is what is actual, the thing to be negated, whether fleetingly or sustainably, by purposive activity. It cannot be erased without — effort, will, action, change, grace, transformation — each word is philosophically problematic in its own right. But the point is that some extra term must be added to the equation life presents in order to avoid a whole lot of grief.
However, pain is a fact of life like pleasure — the teaching of Buddhism is that these constants are actually not one with dukkha, despite its ultimate constancy. Dukkha can be arrested, despite the seeming attendant stipulation that it is the only thing that is constant — just this is the paradoxical gospel that the Noble Truths and Buddhism itself proclaim. But it cannot be arrested by simple manipulation and husbandry of pleasure and pain — you can’t solve the problem of materiality with subordinate material items, just as you can’t wake someone up from a dream just by telling them that they’re dreaming. Something mystical is required “off-balance-sheet”, across a wholly other axis transcendentally separated by a threshold, and it is this to which “nirvana” refers.
Pain is a necessary, “logical” response of a self to an injury, but suffering, or ‘dukkha’, is in the mind, a space “across the axis.” Nirvana means the extinction of the false self that yokes them together at the hip.
Third Issue: The Noble Truths are Description, not Editorial
The third source of confusion is the notion that by itself this doctrine amounts to a “second half” of religion, an interpretation about the highest facts of reality rather than the facts themselves. The choice to present certain naked and uninterpreted facts represents itself — arguably — a type of thoroughgoing religious interpretation and sense of mandate. But the Buddha taught simply that suffering is affirmative and pleasure is negative, literally negate-ive of this principal state of dukkha. This final frontier of God’s dream, which all Indian philosophy stipulates common “historical” reality to be, is the very worst and ugliest phase of God’s engagement with Himself because the shoe is on the other foot: the default is the downward pull of inertia and lack: there is something which must be acquired now, rather than something held which simply must not be lost.
Pleasure can only be experienced as a transition, and like doing drugs or fleeing the state authorities, eventually the house always wins. The Noble Truths are, among other things, an invocation against the escape from dukkha with mere pleasure, or even with “joy” — something less flimsy and spiritually suspect. “Joy” exists somewhere between pleasure and happiness — pegged to the existence of something real and sustainable, but still conditioned in space and time, and thus subject to decay and dissolution, and thus ultimately, to dukkha.
Schopenhauer once observed that the lower classes suffer from pain, and the upper classes from boredom, and that the upper classes have it worse. The shift of principal malady for great masses of the population from the former to the latter explains no small measure of the unique, Kafkaesque ills of modern times, especially in the realm of politics. As we conquer more and more of the material squalor that post-lapsarian man found himself in, the conspicuous failure to eliminate the dukkha that made it a real problem in the first place only gradually has forced the post-religious world if there was something else the matter after all. Whether or not living in this fallen, dukkha-maimed world is a redeemable or worthy proposition is a separate question from whether there is a legitimate alternative to it. “Pessimism” means an invitation to despair; and Buddhism is unequivocally a condemnation of despair in all forms, the doctrine that there might not always be a way — some way — out of dukkha.
