One of the ideas mentioned in passing in the post about the Four Quartets is the Unity of Opposites. This refers to a situation where two things often thought of as opposite are necessary for each other to exist, and so are mutually dependent. As noted in that post, one of the epigraphs to the Four Quartets is Heraclitus’s observation that
the way upwards and the way downwards is one and the same.
Note the verb is ‘is’, not ‘are’ – there is one way, and it runs in both directions. The notion of upwards doesn’t make sense without downwards, and vice versa.
Earthsea
I first encountered this idea (without understanding it as such) at about the age of 9 or 10 in the epigraph to Ursula Le Guin‘s A Wizard of Earthsea:
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
– The Creation of Éa
(The Creation of Éa is a song of Earthsea, Le Guin’s fictional archipelago.)
At various points in A Wizard of Earthsea one or another of the characters refers to the unity of opposites, for example by saying ‘to light a candle is to cast a shadow‘ and ‘For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.‘
Silence and speech, dark and light, death and life: all are pairs of opposites that co-constitute each other. Le Guin explores this idea throughout all the Books of Earthsea, perhaps most of all the necessity of death for life to have meaning. In the third book of the series, The Farthest Shore, the character Sparrowhawk, greatest mage of his day, says ‘To refuse death is to refuse life‘ and later ‘Only what is mortal bears life … Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. It is a movement – an eternal becoming.‘
A mathematical analogy
Consider a line extended indefinitely far in both directions, and bend the ends of this line into a circle so that the extremities almost but don’t quite touch each other, as illustrated below:
Each point on the black line (e.g. those marked with black dots) is mapped onto a point on the green circle via a blue line projecting from the top of the circle to the black line (the green dots correspond to the black dots). Moving further along the line in either direction means getting closer to the top of the green circle, but no matter how far we go, we never reach the top of the circle. However, the extremities of the line become closer and closer to each other at the top of the circle even though they are further and further away in relation to the line.
The circle is ‘missing’ the point right at the very top, because the two ends of the line never quite meet no matter how far out we go in both directions. The circle can be completed by adding a single point, called the point at infinity and denoted ∞ without a + or – prefix.
Adding the point at infinity can be interpreted as unifying the opposites, and the point itself represents their unity.
(As an aside for mathematicians: this is an example of the Alexandroff one-point compactification, and contrasts with the two-point compactification of the real line in which two points at infinity are added, +∞ and -∞, one at each end of the line. My Grandad, an academic mathematician, always used to note that the use of +∞ is to distinguish from the ∞ involved in the one-point compactification and so the + sign is not redundant. The one-point compactification generalises to the stereographic projection between the complex plane and the Riemann sphere, and in fact the diagram above can be regarded as a cross-section through the stereographic projection.)
A deeper metaphor
The Matter with Things is the magnum opus of Iain McGilchrist. There is much more to be said about this book (and his earlier work The Master and his Emissary) both of which are truly magnificent, but at the time of writing this post I haven’t quite finished the first of the two volumes in which it is published and so this will have to wait.
As a brief aside in chapter 15, McGilchrist expresses the mathematical analogy above, and then adds a third dimension by recasting the circle as a spiral:
Although paradox can fruitfully be thought of as two ends of a dipole, another way of expressing the coming together of opposites is not in terms of a straight line, but of a curve, prolonging each end until one comes ‘full circle’. However, it may be not so much a case of coming full circle as ‘full spiral’, so to speak. Not that when you go far enough in one direction you arrive precisely where you started from, but that you arrive at a position superimposed on that from which you started, at the next turn of the spiral.
The Matter with Things, Chapter 15 (p. 607)
McGilchrist goes on to quote from Eliot’s Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Little Gidding: V
and notes in relation to this quotation ‘this is why Eliot says, truly, that over a lifetime one keeps arriving at a fresh understanding of what seem to be the same imponderables, the same words, the same set of circumstances, images or ideas‘.
Let us return now to the epigraph from A Wizard of Earthsea quoted at the start of this post, and its final lines ‘Bright the hawk’s flight / on the empty sky.‘
As with all good poetry this can be interpreted in many different ways: before reading the book as making the most of life in the sure and certain foreknowledge of death; after reading it as a reference to the character Sparrowhawk; even, perhaps as alluding to emptiness and the brightness even a tentative and partial understanding of this can bring to life.
In the light of McGilchrist’s spiral metaphor, it’s hard not to think of an additional layer to this, with the hawk’s flight moving from the two-dimensional opposites in the earlier lines of the epigraph (only in silence the word) into the third dimension of the spiral. Thus I have arrived back at the place where I started from, nearly 40 years later at the time of writing this post, but now from a higher vantage point; and if not quite knowing the place fully, then at least understanding it better.
The fourth and final post in this series about ‘fours’ is, fittingly, an introduction to TS Eliot‘s Four Quartets. This is a cycle of four poems, published between 1936 and 1942. Each poem is a quartet in the sense of combining multiple motifs and themes. As Eliot himself put it:
There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter.
Each poem is named after a place, and relates to one of the four classical elements, respectively air (or light), earth, water and fire, as shown in the diagram. There are also some connections between the poems and the four seasons, but these are less clear than the elements. The fourth poem, Little Gidding, stands on its own, and also resolves some of the themes from the other three (indicated by the arrows in the diagram), leading to unification of the Four Quartets as a whole.
Much of the imagery, references and allusions in the Four Quartets are Christian, which might perhaps jar as the fourth post in a set where the other three are about Buddhism. However, in the poems Eliot also had regard to traditions with some things in common with Buddhism. And to my mind there are some similarities between Christian thinking and Buddhism that I hope to draw out in this post.
Each poem has a five-part structure, also used in Eliot’s earlier masterpiece The Waste Land. By way of extremely reductive summary, the first section of each poem relates to time in some way; the second to dissatisfaction; the third to forms of vacancy; the fourth is more lyrical, and more clearly Christian, referring either to part of the Trinity or Mary; and the last section of each poem has regard to language, love, wholeness and salvation.
The Four Quartets were instrumental in Eliot receiving the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature and are arguably his crowning poetic achievement, alongside The Waste Land. As the speech at the Nobel awards ceremony put it:
The purely poetical part of Eliot’s work is not quantitatively great, but as it now stands out against the horizon, it rises from the ocean like a rocky peak and indisputably forms a landmark, sometimes assuming the mystic contours of a cathedral. It is poetry impressed with the stamp of strict responsibility and extraordinary self-discipline, remote from all emotional clichés, concentrated entirely on essential things, stark, granitic, and unadorned, but from time to time illuminated by a sudden ray from the timeless space of miracles and revelations.
From the 1948 Nobel award ceremony speech by Anders Österling
At the time of writing, I have been reading and seeking to understand these poems for over 20 years. They are the only poetic works that I have taken the time to revisit. What keeps me coming back is that the words of the poems seem to transcend language and give me a sense of the ineffable. As Ursula Le Guin put it:
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
As with fiction, so with poetry; especially so with the Four Quartets.
The text of the Four Quartets is online in several places. My preferred source is here, not least because of the useful notes.
Each line begins with a capital letter, regardless of whether it starts a new sentence or is an enjambment in which a prior sentence continues. To my mind, the enjambment creates a helpfully disorienting effect, in which lines are read as wholes and are then combined with the preceding or succeeding lines to make larger units of thought. It gives a way of reading the text that overlaps with, but is not the same as, the ordinary use of phrases, clauses and sentences, and can be seen as a technical device that helps to transcend language.
I make no attempt to ‘explain’ the poems, or the Four Quartets as a whole: they convey in words what cannot be conveyed in words, and required the skill of a Nobel laureate to do so. However, in an attempt to draw out potentially interesting points of connection with Buddhism, I permit myself several quotations in the discussions of the poems below. Quotations extract words from their context, and thereby deprive them of much of their meaning. This is particularly fraught for the poems making up the Four Quartets, where understanding emerges very gradually from repeated readings of the whole over time. As Eliot said:
The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.
TS Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
Thus I emphasise that this post is merely an introduction. To do them justice, the poems should be read in full and as a whole. There is much interesting commentary available elsewhere.
Burnt Norton
Burnt Norton was published in 1936. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article. It was not originally conceived as the first in a series, but to stand on its own.
Burnt Norton is a manor house in the Cotswolds visited by Eliot with his friend Emily Hale in 1934. Much of the imagery of the poem relates to roses, and this is thought to be inspired by the rose garden at Burnt Norton.
The poem begins with two epigraphs from Heraclitus, translated as:
although logos [knowledge or reason] is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own and the way upwards and the way downwards is one and the same.
The second of these is an example of the unity of opposites. This is present in Taoist thinking, with the clearest example being yin-yang. Jung also used the idea of the unity of (unconscious) opposites in his idea of enantiodromia.
Heraclitus also advocated a doctrine of flux (sometimes expressed concisely as one cannot step in the same river twice). This is very similar to the Buddhist idea of impermanence.
Burnt Norton starts as follows:
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
This firmly establishes time as a theme, and it recurs throughout the poem. These lines were originally intended for Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedralbut were removed because he (or his producer) considered they lacked drama.
The idea of the present being the only true reality is a feature of many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism. There is a wide-ranging article (on the site Brain Pickings, which has a wealth of interesting material and is highly recommended) discussing Alan Watts’s views on this. That article also touches on the idea of no-self.
But as the poem says towards the end of the first section, human kind / Cannot bear very much reality, and so we often take refuge in memories of the past and anticipation of the future. The poem talks of two kinds of past: what has been (the completed past) and what might have been (the subjunctive past). The subjunctive past is similar to the future, both involve imagination and are a source of attachment, of emotional investment that can lead to suffering in the Buddhist sense. Even the completed past is uncertain given the fallibility of memory, the tendency of the brain not just to forget, but to rewrite history in light of subsequent experiences.
Part of the second section can be interpreted in terms of being released from attachment in the manner of the third Noble Truth:
The inner freedom from the practical desire, The release from action and suffering, release from the inner And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving, Erhebung without motion, concentration Without elimination, both a new world And the old made explicit, understood In the completion of its partial ecstasy, The resolution of its partial horror.
Concentration without elimination may refer to the Sanskrit samadhi, the eighth element of the Noble Eightfold Way. Similar mental states arise in Christianity too, for example hesychasm.
The classical element is air (in a slightly wider sense that includes light):
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light
The lotos (or lotus) appears as a symbol in several religions, including Buddhism, and represents escaping from defilement: the flowers have their roots in mud, but open into beauty. The spelling lotos is lexically closer to logos, the Word that was in the beginning.
The last section talks frankly of the difficulties of expressing some things in language:
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Given the extent of Eliot’s ambition, who can blame him for this?
The last section also contrasts love with desire:
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being.
Here desire seems to be related to the Buddhist idea of tanha. And the nature of the love Eliot is talking about here feels to me like the Christian agape, the unconditional love of God, and its human approximations.
East Coker
East Coker was written and published in 1940. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article. It was very popular when published, selling nearly 12,000 copies to a British public who were perhaps inspired by its messages of resilience as it was becoming clear that the second World War was not going to be over quickly.
East Coker is a village in Somerset in which Eliot’s ancestral home was located. A church in East Coker is the final resting-place of his ashes.
Where Burnt Norton discusses past, present and future, East Coker talks about beginnings and ends, opening thus:
In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Much of the imagery relates to earth, for example:
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
The other elements are also present to a lesser extent. One particularly striking passage brings in air and water:
Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Eliot continues to acknowledge his struggle with words, both in the second section:
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. … The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
and in the fifth section:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.
Part of the third section is almost like a Zen koan with its conjunctions of opposites:
In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
As with Burnt Norton, love appears in the last section, again outside time and with a sense of agape:
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
The waters of the petrel and porpoise look forward to the water imagery of The Dry Salvages, and the final sentence quoted immediately above is in harmonious opposition to the opening In my beginning is my end.
The Dry Salvages
The Dry Salvages was written and published in 1941. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article. A note by Eliot explains that the title refers to a small group of rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts (where he spent time as a child), and salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
The elemental theme is water, and is more prominent as a theme than in the earlier two poems. The water theme is present in the opening section, starting with a river:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget.
and proceeding to the sea, references to which continue throughout the poem:
The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation … The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. … The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, The distant rote in the granite teeth, And the wailing warning from the approaching headland Are all sea voices
The continuity between the river (within us) and the sea (all about us) reminds me of the beautiful water-droplet metaphor for no-self. And the comparison of the river and the sea to the gods reminds me of the use of gods as a metaphor for unconscious forces by followers of Jung, for example James Hollis.
It is towards the end of the first section that the theme of time reappears:
The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers, older Than time counted by anxious worried women Lying awake, calculating the future, Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel And piece together the past and the future
Taken together with the initial excerpt about the river, we see Eliot contrasting the measurable time of civilisation with deeper and more ‘primitive’ time that has been forgotten and swept away by the illusions of city-dwelling. This reminds me of the distinction between reality as perceived by the ego, within Metzinger’s tunnel, and what we might see from outside the ego-tunnel, if such a thing were possible.
The fourth section is a plea to the Christian Mary to intercede for all those on the sea. This is a moving prayer even when taken literally as relating to fishers and other seafarers, but given that the sea is a metaphor, it seems plausible that Eliot means to include everyone.
Unlike the first two poems, there are no direct references to difficulties with words. However there is an long passage at the start of the last section listing ways in which people seek to understand things without using language: astrology, seances, palm-reading, and so on. Eliot says:
all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity
I take the use of pastimes and drugs to criticise the methods, rather than the objective of trying to achieve an understanding beyond language.
In a beautiful passage within the last section, Eliot weaves multiple themes together: time, music, love and Christianity:
But to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint— No occupation either, but something given And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.
This sense that there is ‘more to it’, that one can lose oneself from the everyday world, and in doing so find oneself, is common to many forms of spirituality, notwithstanding their very different theologies.
Little Gidding
Little Gidding was written and published in 1942. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article.
Little Gidding is a small village in Cambridgeshire that formerly housed an Anglican community. Eliot visited in 1936, but otherwise had no direct personal connection with the village.
The poem seeks to harmonise and unify the themes of the earlier three poems. It does this while introducing new imagery, notably fire, both in itself and as Pentecostal fire, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Jesus’s baptism of his disciples according to the Christian Bible. Thus the fire is a source of salvation.
Two lines from the first section catch my attention every time I read this poem:
Between melting and freezing The soul’s sap quivers.
This can be read in many ways, of course, but one that appeals to me is as a metaphor for the idea that only in the present moment are we truly alive, between the frozen past and the molten future.
There is a passage on attachment in the third section, which reminds me of the Buddhist idea of near and far enemies. If detachment is a virtue and attachment its far enemy, then indifference is its near enemy.
There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life, Being between two lives—unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle.
Immediately following this passage, Eliot again contrasts love and desire, as he did in Burnt Norton:
This is the use of memory: For liberation—not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.
In the last section, Eliot finally reaches contentment with his use of words:
every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together)
Towards the end of the last section, Eliot talks of
A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)
It seems plausible that this is intended to be interpreted in a Christian way, perhaps as total surrender to the love of God that leads to forgiveness of original sin, and yet it is also reminiscent of nirvana. Invoking the unity of opposites, the fire of Christian salvation is perhaps not so very different to the extinguishment of Buddhist nirvana.
Conclusion
In this fourth post on ‘fours’, I introduced TS Eliot’s Four Quartets and drew out some potential connections between them and the earlierthreeposts on Buddhism.
In both Christianity and Buddhism we are born into a ‘fallen’ state (original sin and samsara), and have to surrender ourselves (or our selves) to enter a state of grace. On the surface, the nature of the surrender is quite different: Christian faith in the divine as compared to the Noble Eightfold Way. Christian heaven and Buddhist nirvana seem very different too: eternal life in bliss or eternal extinguishment, albeit also without any suffering.
But suppose one takes the divine to consist of all living creatures across past, present and future, without boundaries in either space or time, so that our water droplets merge not just into one Ocean, but a Timeless Ocean existing at all moments, without beginnings or ends. Further, suppose that surrender means acknowledgement of participation in this Timeless Ocean, so that the boundaries around the ego in both space and time dissolve. Then perhaps these two great forms of human spirituality aren’t so very different after all.
This is another post about ‘four of something’, this time the four sublime attitudes, or brahma-viharas. They are considered to be the highest emotions in Buddhism:
Vicarious joy, rejoicing in response to another’s joy
Equanimity, the wish for the discernment and willpower to remain in emotional equilibrium in all circumstances
The two elements of brahma-viharas can each be translated in several different ways: brahma as sublime, divine or heavenly, and viharas as attitudes, states, abodes or estates. I’ve chosen sublime to avoid metaphysical difficulties with divine and heavenly. And using ‘attitudes’ emphasises that they can be adopted at will, whereas the other translations feel more passive to me.
In keeping with the no-self idea, these attitudes are intended to apply to everyone, with no distinction between oneself and others. (Vicarious joy only really applies to others.)
These attitudes predated Buddhism but were developed within Buddhist thinking and there are detailed meditation practices for each of them. This is all set out in detail in Sharon Salzberg‘s book Loving-kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and I have included a very brief summary of the meditation practices towards the end of the post.
In the diagram at the head of this post I’ve arranged the attitudes as a ‘see-saw’ with the first three in a row, pivoting around loving-kindness in the middle, with compassion and vicarious joy at either end, balanced on equanimity underneath. That arrangement helps me to think of compassion and vicarious joy as wholesome responses to sorrowful or joyful experiences, with loving-kindness being adopted regardless of circumstances, and equanimity underpinning the other three. It also brings out that the other three attitudes grow from loving-kindness.
These attitudes are an important part of resisting the Three Poisons (fear, greed, and ignorance) discussed under the second Noble Truth. We can think of compassion as being preferable to fear or aversion in response to another’s suffering, and likewise vicarious joy as improving on envy in response to another’s happiness. An interesting post here draws a closer connection between the sublime attitudes and the Noble Truths.
If one takes the sublime attitudes towards oneself (which I think most people would), and also accepts the truth of no-self, then it is logical to take the same attitudes towards others. However, it is important to be clear where the boundaries are. To understand this, it is helpful to introduce the idea of karma. This refers to the results of past intentions and actions contributing to present and future conditions, and is a natural corollary of interdependence. As we saw with nirvana in the post on the Four Noble Truths, there is a metaphysical sense to karma that may be unhelpful (the view that ‘bad luck results from bad deeds in a past life’). But one does not have to believe in reincarnation to understand that (un)wholesome intentions and acts can have (un)wholesome outcomes that reverberate interdependently through a person’s life, and the lives of others. Whether the effects persist beyond death is not really the point as far as this life is concerned.
With very limited exceptions, everyone is responsible for their own intentions and actions. As a result, everyone owns their own karma. That doesn’t mean people are responsible for bad luck that befalls them from out of nowhere, which is why everyone should be treated by others in accordance with the sublime attitudes. But everyone is responsible for their contribution to current circumstances. The sublime attitudes do not seek to subvert this karmic responsibility and ownership. Instead they strike a middle way (or Golden Mean) between the two extremes of trying to do everything for other people, and doing nothing in complete indifference. On one occasion when I was really struggling with this, I came up with the phrase ‘caring without caring’. This is perhaps a bit close to being an annoying faux-Zen koan, but nevertheless is one way of illustrating the balance that needs to be struck.
Below I expand on each of the sublime attitudes in turn.
Loving-kindness
This is a translation of the Pali metta (Sanskrit maitri) and can also be expressed as benevolence or good-will, or sometimes just kindness, or even love. Love isn’t a particularly helpful translation: in current Western usage it is tightly caught up with romantic love, with other meanings being secondary and masked by the use of a single word to cover a wide range of different forms of love. However, the use of loving as a qualifier to kindness works reasonably well, in my view.
In her book on loving-kindness, Sharon Salzberg introduces the idea using an excerpt from a beautiful poem by Galway Kinnell:
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on the brow of the flower, and retell it in words and in touch, it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
Salzberg notes that ‘reteaching a thing its loveliness’ is the essence of loving-kindness, and cautions against confusing it with passion or sentimentality, both of which are close to attachment.
In traditional Buddhist teaching, each of the sublime attitudes has two ‘enemies’: a ‘far enemy’ which is the obvious opposite, and a ‘near enemy’ which is superficially similar to the attitude but subtly different in a way that tends to undermine it. Fairly clearly, the far enemy of loving-kindness is ill-will, or even hatred. The near enemy is selfish affection, which can be thought of as loving-kindness defiled by attachment and conditionality.
Put differently, a sentimental feeling of apparent benevolence towards somebody because it makes us feel good, or only during good times, or so we can get something in return, or while we consider the recipient ‘deserves it’, is not loving-kindness. The intent has to be unconditional goodwill purely for the other person’s sake. It’s fine if something good is likely to happen to us as a result of the goodwill we wish the other (‘collateral benefit’), but that can’t form part of the intent.
Compassion
Compassion is used as a translation of the Pali karuna (same word in Sanskrit), which connotes both compassion towards others and self-compassion. The wish is for suffering to reduce and cease, and it is the expression of loving-kindness in the face of sorrow, or as Salzberg puts it, ‘compassion is the refinement of love that opens to suffering‘. Much the same can be said about vicarious joy being the refinement of love that opens to joy, and this is one of the reasons for putting compassion and vicarious joy on opposite sides of loving-kindness in the diagram.
The far enemy of compassion is cruelty, in the sense of wanting to make bad things worse, or taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering. The near enemy is pity, in the modern sense connoting a patronising sense of superiority in relation to the person suffering, possibly with a sense of relief that ‘at least it isn’t me’.
As with loving-kindness, the difference between compassion and its near enemy relates to intentions: one needs to feel compassion purely for the other person’s sake, which rules out superiority and patronisation. Doing this can be very difficult if one is empathising with another person’s suffering in the strict sense of experiencing similar emotions, because empathy leads to suffering in one’s own right, and in turn that means compassion can sometimes be selfishly motivated, at least in part.
In order to feel true compassion one has to let go of empathetic suffering, and stand back in order to direct compassion towards the other for their own sake. This is hardest of all when the person suffering is a loved one, but unless one treats the feelings arising from empathy neutrally, it can lead to trying to ‘fix’ or ‘rescue’ people for what are ultimately selfish reasons.
Developing the ability to stand back from emotions felt through empathy has the side effect of helping to stand back from emotions felt directly, and vice versa. Both help to weaken the hold emotions have on the mind. This doesn’t mean ignoring them – emotions are very often things that need to be heeded – but by not attaching to them, they cease to be painful.
It can also be hard to feel compassion for another when things are going well for oneself, but it is another sign of attachment if one feels one’s own happiness is ‘spoiled’ by someone else’s suffering.
Vicarious joy
This is an inelegant translation of Pali mudita (same word in Sanskrit) and refers to rejoicing in the joy of others. It is often translated as sympathetic or empathetic joy. In my view, neither of these translations quite works: sympathetic is too close to compassion and that undermines the joyful aspect; and it isn’t necessary to be able to empathise directly in order to take delight in the pleasure of others. Indeed, empathy is sometimes simply not possible, for example the childless cannot empathise directly with new parents, but it is definitely still possible to rejoice in their joy. So I’ve reluctantly settled on vicarious joy as a translation.
Vicarious joy is like loving-kindness (and unlike compassion and equanimity) in that there is no single-word English translation that works in general. (There is a word ‘compersion’ but this is not well-known and where it does turn up, it’s used in a more specific sense than is useful here.)
The far enemy of vicarious joy is envy: feeling unhappy at someone else’s joy, in a similar way to cruelty being pleasure at someone else’s suffering. The near enemy is exuberance, in the sense of ‘piggy-backing’ on someone else’s joy for selfish reasons. Again it’s all about intention: there is a big difference between selflessly expressing joy for another’s sake, and trying to hijack it for one’s own sake. It can be hard to rejoice for another when one is suffering oneself, but cultivating habits that allow this are a form of self-compassion.
Equanimity
This is from Pali upekkha (Sanskrit upeksa). It relates to determined emotional neutrality in the face of ever-changing fortunes for oneself and others. As the Buddhist monk and writer Bhikku Bodhi puts it:
The real meaning of upekkha is equanimity, not indifference in the sense of unconcern for others. As a spiritual virtue, upekkha means stability in the face of the fluctuations of worldly fortune. It is evenness of mind, unshakeable freedom of mind, a state of inner equipoise that cannot be upset by gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Upekkha is freedom from all points of self-reference; it is indifference only to the demands of the ego-self with its craving for pleasure and position, not to the well-being of one’s fellow human beings. … [Equanimity] does not override and negate the preceding three [attitudes], but perfects and consummates them.
The far enemy is attachment, which amplifies positive and negative emotions once it takes hold, and the near enemy is indifference. There are some aspects in common with the Stoic apatheia, which originally referred to not being captured by emotions. It’s a shame that the English word apathy has picked up the connotations of the near enemy, much like pity now has in relation to compassion.
One can think of the causes and conditions that have arisen as falling into two categories: one’s own karma, which one is responsible for, and everything else, which one isn’t. Equanimity helps one to see the distinction, not to get emotionally caught up in things one can’t control (the reasoning of the Serenity Prayer is also relevant), and to find the middle way of helping others, without taking ownership or responsibility for things that one ought not to.
Meditation practices to support the sublime attitudes
There is a meditation practice to support each of the four sublime attitudes. For loving-kindness, one starts in the same way as mindfulness meditation by relaxing in a conducive posture, and then one mentally recites the following (or similar) phrases:
May I be free from danger
May I have mental happiness
May I have physical happiness
May I have ease of well-being
This can be repeated as often as helpful, or synchronised with the breath. Personally, I find 10 repetitions, with one cycle of breath per line, works well.
It’s important to ‘really mean it’ rather than just reciting the words for the sake of it. A good sign that one means it is a feeling of emotional warm-heartedness that can be directed to different people at will, rather than attracting itself to some people and being repelled from others.
Directing loving-kindness to oneself can feel quite strange but I can attest it definitely has a beneficial effect. Partly this may be the result of physical relaxation and focused breathing, but reciting these phrases helps one to look at oneself ‘from the outside’, so to speak, and that also seems to be beneficial. The neutrality of the verb ‘may’ is important too, it makes the appropriate wishes without taking responsibility or ownership.
Having directed loving-kindness to oneself, one then repeats the practice five times for other people, bringing their image to mind, and replacing ‘I’ with ‘you’. First is a benefactor (someone who has been truly helpful), and second a loved one (one’s partner, or a relative or close friend), then third someone to whom one is indifferent (for example the person working on the checkout at the last shop one bought something from), fourth someone whom one dislikes or is in conflict with, and finally all beings. Sending loving-kindness to a disliked person can be particularly hard, and reminding oneself of the ‘may’ can be helpful in finding a neutral position that doesn’t get captured by negative emotions.
Directing the same thoughts to people to whom one has a a wide range of instinctive emotional reactions has several benefits:
the regular breathing and physical relaxation help one to see the instinctive emotional reactions arise, and to start to learn how to let go of them before they take root in the mind
it thereby helps to reduce attachment and conditionality to the benefactor and loved one, and likewise to reduce aversion to the disliked person
treating all these people in the same way helps to break down the artificial barriers between self and others
this is reinforced by sending loving-kindness to all beings, as it is necessary to think of all beings as a whole rather than an unimaginably vast collection of individuals.
There are similar exercises for the other three sublime attitudes, with different sets of phrases appropriate to the situation.
For compassion one could recite ‘may I/you be free from pain’, ‘may I/you find peace’, or in some circumstances ‘may I/you find a way to bear my/your pain’ might be more appropriate.
For vicarious joy the phrases might be ‘may my/your good fortune continue’ or ‘may my/your happiness not diminish’.
For equanimity the words are a little different: ‘all beings are owners of their karma; their happiness and unhappiness depend on their actions, not on my wishes for them.’ As Salzberg notes, this does not undermine the other three sublime attitudes, but is a realistic way of setting sensible boundaries. She gives the example of someone who is acting self-destructively: we wholeheartedly send them our goodwill and wish their suffering to cease and for them to be happy, while recognising that they are ultimately responsible for their own actions. Not setting this boundary can lead to codependency.
Conclusion
This post discussed the four sublime attitudes, their near and far enemies as shown in the table below, and showed some connections to the ideas in earlier posts. It also introduced the idea of karma.
Attitude
Near enemy
Far enemy
Loving-kindness
Selfish affection
Ill-will
Compassion
Pity
Cruelty
Vicarious joy
Exuberance
Envy
Equanimity
Indifference
Attachment
The four sublime attitudes, and their near and far enemies
The links are to Wikipedia articles about these ideas. In this post I’m going to try (as well as I can!) to explain in my own words what I understand by these concepts. The focus is on definitions, not ramifications, and I will draw out more about each concept in subsequent posts.
Buddhism is full of ‘numbered groups’: three marks of existence, four noble truths, five aggregates, and so on. For some reason, the four concepts above don’t seem to be discussed in a numbered group of their own, and yet to me they are strongly interlinked and belong together. The closest numbered grouping I could find was the four dharma seals, which includes impermanence and emptiness, alongside dukkha and nirvana.
I am a pure mathematician by education and inclination, if not by profession, so I like to work from the abstract to the concrete, starting with ‘axioms’ and deriving results from them. Under that approach, interdependence and emptiness are more at the axiomatic end, with impermanence and no-self arguably being consequences of these axioms. The Buddha himself was concerned with alleviating human suffering, and for this purpose, no-self is arguably the most important concept, with the other three being ideas that help to understand no-self.
Compressed to bare essentials, with expansion under each heading below, the four concepts flow as follows:
All phenomena are dependent on, and arise from, other phenomena. Thus all phenomena are mutually interdependent upon each other.
As such, nothing exists purely by itself, and so all phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence and meaning.
Further, no phenomenon exists permanently; every phenomenon is impermanent and in flux, changing in response to changes in the phenomena it arises from.
In particular, the ‘self’ of human consciousness is a phenomenon, and so, there is no self that has an independent and permanent existence. Instead what we think of as a ‘conscious self’ is continuously arising from varying conditions, and as a result is constantly changing, without a permanent identity.
The idea of no-self is profoundly counter-intuitive to everyday experience and takes quite a bit of getting use to, so please bear with me while I gradually build up to it via the other three concepts.
Interdependence
Interdependence is also referred to as (inter)dependent origination and (inter)dependent co-arising and is a translation of the Sanskrit pratiysamutpada (Pali paticcasamuppada).
Interdependence means that all phenomena are dependent on, and arise from, other phenomena. In some Buddhist texts, this is expressed as ‘when this is, that is; this arising, that arises; when this is not, that is not; this ceasing, that ceases.‘ This idea underlies the reasoning of the Four Noble Truths: by removing the causes of suffering, suffering ceases.
I’m using phenomenon here as a translation of the Pali sankhara (Sanskrit samskara), which can also be translated as ‘compounded things’, ‘formations’, and ‘things that have been put together’.
In this technical sense, a phenomenon is anything that is capable of being perceived. Another way to think of it is that a phenomenon is something formed from parts. Even atoms are phenomena under this definition, since they have nuclei and electrons, and the nuclei consist of protons and neutrons. Possibly the quarks of which protons and neutrons consist are not phenomena in this compounded sense, but then it seems that quarks can’t be perceived individually but only as part of larger particles.
Anyway, for practical purposes, anything we interact with in everyday life is a phenomenon. Crucially for no-self and the Four Noble Truths, that includes mental processes and formations, as well as material things. Thoughts and emotions arise based on sensory perceptions, and other mental formations. In fact, in Buddhism, thinking and emotions are treated as a sense alongside sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.
The definition above is for interdependence in an abstract, ‘wide’ sense. There is also a more specific ‘narrow’ meaning in which there are twelve links that give rise via mental formations to suffering. Exploring this would take us too far out of the way in this post, which is focused on defining the four foundational concepts, but suffice to say that mindfulness and other forms of meditation are a key technique to ease the suffering arising from interdependence in the narrower sense.
To try to make the idea of interdependence somewhat less abstract, think of what had to happen for you to be reading these words. A vast network of causes and conditions gave rise to you the reader, me the writer, the thinking I am trying to understand and re-express from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, the words themselves, the (possibly different!) meanings we each attribute to them, the technologies by which they are communicated and which you are using to read the words, the way in which you discovered this post and made the decision to read it, and so on. It’s too much to comprehend fully, particularly because human nature tends to want to reduce things to a single cause wherever possible. (As an aside this is often for social or emotional reasons, for example so that praise or blame can be attributed.) Interdependence says things aren’t as simple as that.
There is a beautiful way to visualise interdependence called Indra’s Net in which there is a jewel at every place two cords of the net intersect, and every jewel is reflected in every other jewel. As Alan Watts put it:
Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
Arguably, nirvana itself is an example of something that exists that is not compounded. As such it lacks both interdependence and impermanence, and is not a phenomenon in the technical sense used above.
Emptiness
There is a settled translation of Sanskrit sunyata (Pali sunnata) as emptiness – other translations like voidness don’t seem to have caught on.
Emptiness is absolutely fundamental to Buddhist thinking. I discuss it after interdependence only because personally I find interdependence easier to relate to. When I first came across emptiness, I had to keep reminding myself ‘empty of what’, to which the answer is ‘of intrinsic or independent existence’. The intrinsic and independent qualifiers are important. Emptiness is not nihilism: Buddhists do not argue that nothing exists, only that nothing exists in and of itself, ‘in its own-being’ as the Heart Sutra puts it. Thus the definitions of interdependence and emptiness both rely on careful use of qualifiers (‘compounded’ and ‘intrinsic’, respectively) to make statements that are general, yet precise enough to lead to profound insights.
In modern Western thought, emptiness sounds quite negative, and yet emptiness is not about nothingness, but rather wholeness. The Heart Sutra famously says Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form. This is discussed beautifully here and shows emptiness to be humbling, inspiring and comforting.
If you look at the logic marshaled by Buddhist philosophers on behalf of the doctrine of emptiness, you’ll see that it has much to do with a Buddhist idea that’s often rendered in English as “interdependent co-arising.” This basically means that things which may seem to exist independently of other things are in fact dependent for their existence and their character on other things. Trees need sunlight and water, and indeed are continually being changed by these and other things they come into contact with. … In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.
Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True
Lack of intrinsic existence is sometimes referred to as emptiness of essence. There is also emptiness as a mode of perception, in which the aim is to see things as they are, adding nothing and taking nothing away. The link in the previous sentence discusses this very nicely, so all I will add in this post is a link to an excerpt from David Gemmell’s novel Waylander about catching a pebble in the moonlight, and how much harder that is in a state of fear when there’s more at stake (in the novel the example is the lives of the children of one of the characters). The immediate point being made is about conquering fear, but to my mind there is a deeper point about emptiness: catching the pebble in the moonlight is just that, no more, no less. Everything else, including fear, is added by the mind rather than being intrinsic to the act of catching the pebble.
For a less dramatic example of the emptiness mode, imagine sending an email to a close friend, who uncharacteristically doesn’t reply for several days. Some (many?) people might feel annoyed at the lack of response, or worried that something is amiss. There are so many different stories that we can tell ourselves in situations like this, and often they say more about ourselves and what we are projecting into the situation than about the reality. The emptiness mode helps us not to worry: until the facts are known, all we know is there has been no reply; and when we know the reason for that, we can deal with it on its own terms. Perhaps our friend has been having technical problems with email, or been deluged with other emails. Even if something bad has happened, fact-based compassion is better than fear-based worry.
Nirvana is not a compounded thing, and is not subject to interdependence, but is still empty. This means that emptiness is more ‘fundamental’ than interdependence, and so arguably should come first, but as I say I find interdependence much easier to relate to, and emptiness easier to understand in terms of interdependence.
Impermanence
Again impermanence appears to be a settled translation of Pali annica (Sanskrit anitya). The relevant quotation from the Heart Sutra is ‘all compounded things [phenomena] are impermanent‘. Impermanence is a natural corollary of interdependence: when the causes and conditions of something change, so does the thing itself, and everything (inter)depending on it. Nirvana is again an exception, since it is not compounded, and so is permanent once reached. What could be more positive than the idea that suffering is impermanent but the bliss of nirvana isn’t?
In my view, impermanence is like the first Noble Truth: on the face of it pessimistic, but when examined clearly, realistic and leads to thinking that helps to reduce suffering. An obvious example of impermanence is ageing and death, which few of us want to contemplate deeply. And yet as the Stoics pointed out, ageing and death are wholly natural, and suffering arises more from the attitudes taken towards them.
Impermanence has some affinities with the scientific concept of entropy, which are nicely discussed here.
No-self
This is variously referred to as no-self, non-self and not-self, all of which are translations of Pali anatta (Sanskrit anatman). The idea is that what we think of as a permanent independent self is an illusion, and instead our ‘self’, while it exists, is empty of intrinsic and independent existence, impermanent, and continuously arising from interdependent causes and conditions. As Wright puts it:
Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show.
Strictly speaking, there is no essence within us that stays the same across time, nothing that could not in principle be divided into parts, no substantial self that could exist independently of the body. A “self ” in any stronger or metaphysically interesting sense of the word just does not seem to exist. We must face this fact: We are self-less Ego Machines.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
Metzinger also points out that the self is a process rather than a thing: ‘we are “selfing” organisms: At the very moment we wake up in the morning, the physical system—that is, ourselves—starts the process of “selfing.”’ And he argues that this does not deprive us of free will: ‘The most beautiful idea, perhaps, is that freedom and determinism can peacefully coexist: If our brains are causally determined in the right way, if they make us causally sensitive to moral considerations and rational arguments, then this very fact makes us free. Determinism and free will are compatible.’
No-self is a natural corollary of the other three ideas, if one accepts that mental formations (thoughts and emotions, roughly speaking) are compounded things. Moving away from mental formations and just thinking of the brain itself as a collection of neurons and other cells, these cells are subject to interdependence, emptiness and impermanence, so no-self is a logical position to hold, at least for someone with a materialist view of consciousness.
Wright and Metzinger (among many others, including David Hume) put forward detailed and convincing reasoning in support of no-self, and marshal arguments from evolutionary psychology as to why things might have turned out this way. One of the main ideas is that there are different ‘mental modules’ which use emotions to try to get the conscious mind to pay attention to what they are saying. The propulsive power of emotions can be weakened via mindfulness meditation, allowing calmer and more conscious choices.
Despite all this, the idea of no-self is (at least initially) extremely difficult to accept, it just doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense. A key reason, in my view, is that evolutionary psychology doesn’t want us to accept it. Metzinger again:
Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state. But as we can now clearly see, this process has not optimized our brains and minds toward happiness as such. Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
The hedonic treadmill that Metzinger refers to is pretty clearly connected with tanha and the Four Noble Truths. Rather than explore this further in what is now a very long post, I will finish with a few observations that provide some weak reasons to take no-self seriously, and start to show why, as a matter of logic as well as morality, one should act with compassion and kindness towards others in exactly the same way as one acts towards oneself:
Many theories of psychology posit that the self is composed of, or can draw upon, multiple parts, for example the Freudian ego, id and super-ego, Jungian archetypes, the ego-states of transactional analysis, internal family systems, and so on. It can be objected that much of this relates to mind or personality, rather than self (and in this post I haven’t clearly defined any of these terms). But it is at least suggestive that so many theories think of mental life in terms of composed parts.
My wife has a T-shirt that reads ‘I can’t go back to yesterday – I was a different person then.’ I think many people recognise the truth of this, even if it is on the face of it somewhat counterintuitive. And it is common in programming circles to write comments and other documentation for one’s ‘future self’, on the basis that in the future one is likely to be a different person, with a different set of memories, and what came naturally today may have to be re-learned, or at least refreshed, tomorrow. That’s mostly pragmatic, but there is a kernel of recognition that selves are impermanent.
If our past and future selves are not the same as our self today, but we are motivated to treat them in the same way as our present self, why then should we not treat other people in the same way as ourselves? Put differently, why should variation in time be privileged over variation in space? (We could call this the ‘relativity theory’ of selves.) The late moral philosopher Derek Parfit expands on this point in some detail in his book Reasons and Persons. And the Christian injunction to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ is essentially saying the same thing.
Once we start to recognise that we don’t have selves in the way that evolution wants us to think we do, the barriers between people start to fade. Parfit’s words on this quoted in one of his obituaries are very moving, and it is notable that he used the word tunnel, as Metzinger does:
When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
Derek Parfit
I can attest from fleeting experience that a beautiful feeling of interconnectedness arises when one starts to let go of the idea of a permanent self. This is not just interconnectedness with other people, or other living creatures, but with the whole world, and is sometimes referred to as interbeing. As a dear friend once put it to me, it’s like we are water droplets in the ocean, but all most of us can perceive is the boundary round our own droplet.
Conclusion
In this post I described four foundational ideas of Buddhism, culminating in the counter-intuitive but enlightening idea of no-self, and started to explain how this relates to the Buddha’s goal of liberation from suffering.
Diagram of the Four Noble Truths and their inter-relationships
Introduction
I started meditating for the wholly pragmatic reason that several people had suggested it might help to reduce stress. After a little while, it occurred to me that understanding the thinking behind meditation might be useful too, and I ended up reading Robert Wright’s book Why Buddhism is True. In my view it is a very good book, both insightful and well-written (sadly not all books display both characteristics!), and I have recommended it to several friends. Among other things, it demonstrates convincingly how some of the insights of Buddhism marry up with evolutionary psychology.
Anyhow, beyond this book, I knew almost nothing about Buddhism beyond a very superficial understanding of reincarnation, karma and nirvana that went no further than pop culture, and the fact that the Buddha was a historical person in a similar way to Christ. So I started to explore further, and quickly found the Four Noble Truths. These had been mentioned only briefly in Wright’s book, but are given a lot of weight in other presentations of Buddhism, to the extent of being regarded as foundational. They are identified as the first of the Buddha’s teachings and were present in what is traditionally regarded as his first sermon after he achieved enlightenment.
(There are other ideas regarded as foundational in most Buddhist traditions, for example interdependence, emptiness, impermanence, and no-self, and I will return to these ideas in future posts.)
The Four Noble Truths
The Four Noble Truths are commonly translated into English as follows:
the truth of suffering;
the truth of the origin of suffering;
the truth of the cessation of suffering; and
the truth of the path to the cessation of suffering.
In short, suffering exists; it has an origin and an end; and there is a path leading to its end. From a Western standpoint that regards any suffering as unacceptable, this can come across as quite pessimistic. I prefer to think of it as a realistic assessment of life as it is, and if one accepts the fourth Truth, there is a lot of cause for optimism.
Let’s now unpack each of the four Truths in turn.
1. The Truth of Suffering
Here we encounter an immediate problem with studying Buddhism in English: the lack of direct English referents for the original terms in Pali or Sanskrit. (Both are Indo-Aryan languages in which ancient Buddhist texts are written, and they are generally quite similar to each other. For example nirvana is Sanskrit and the Pali equivalent is nibbana.)
The primary term being discussed is ‘suffering’. This is a translation of the Pali dukkha, which is being used not in the general English sense but to refer to a specific kind of suffering sometimes translated as ‘unsatisfactoriness’. This is a single-word compression of the idea that there are things incapable of satisfying, of providing permanent satisfaction. Even where we can satisfy our desires, the resulting pleasure is fleeting, or if not fleeting then the pleasure dissipates through monotony. As Wright puts it:
“I can’t get no satisfaction” is, according to Buddhism, the human condition.
Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True
2. The Truth of the Origin of Suffering
This Truth goes beyond the bare idea that there is an origin of suffering to say what it is. (In Buddhist thinking, almost everything arises from one or more causes and conditions, so it is self-evident that there is an origin of suffering.)
According to the Buddha, the root cause of dukkha is tanha, translated variously as (unwholesome) desire, thirst, or craving. Tanha itself arises from the Three Poisons (kleshas):
In summary, ignorance of the true nature of things and how to live a wholesome life lead us to attachment to pleasure, and aversion from pain. Both attachment and aversion are forms of craving; one is craving for something, the other is craving for the absence of something. tanha embodies the feeling that things can always be made better by adding something or taking something away, and having done so, there is always more to be added or removed, and no satisfaction can be attained.
Again the inexact nature of the translations leads to difficulties. Personally I think of ‘desire’ as a neutral term, which can be unattached or attached, or equivalently wholesome or unwholesome, harmonious or discordant. In my understanding, the second Truth is not saying that desire in itself is a bad thing, but that attachment to the desire is. Attached desire is the main reason people keep checking their phones, in anticipation of a message from someone, or a ‘like’ on social media. Most of the pleasure is in the anticipation, not in the message or the ‘like’ itself. This is very different to the pleasure from watching the beauty of a sunset, or from spending time with a loved one, or from a fulfilling job.
The second Truth is sometimes misconstrued as saying people should not desire or fear things, and an argument is then developed that Buddhism contains contradictions because it says people should simultaneously both (1) not desire anything and (2) desire the end of suffering, for example by acting with compassion towards oneself and others. The distinction between attached and unattached desire is the key to disentangling this and seeing there is no contradiction.
There are sound evolutionary reasons for tanha. Wright again:
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
This is linked to the idea of the hedonic treadmill from psychology.
3. The Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
The Third Truth says that dukkha will cease if we can renounce tanha. This is verging on tautological in English: satisfaction is achieved by letting go of the things that make it impossible to achieve satisfaction. It is also self-evident in terms of interdependence: if all the causes and conditions of something cease, then that thing will also cease, as illustrated in the diagram at the top of this page. Deeper insight comes from the more precise meaning of the Buddhist terms.
Nirvana refers to the state that arises when suffering ceases. The Three Poisons that give rise to tanha are sometimes represented as fires, and nirvana literally means extinguishment, i.e. putting out these fires. Nirvana is often used in a metaphysical sense meaning ending the cycle of death and reincarnation. There is a more grounded sense in which nirvana refers to the ongoing cycle of perpetuated suffering and unsatisfactoriness within a life, rather than across lives. (The connection between the metaphyscial and more grounded senses makes use of the concepts of no-self and interdependence, which would take us too far out of our way in this post.) Personally I find it easier to accept this more grounded interpretation of the Truth than to believe in reincarnation.
Wright has a lot to say about nirvana in chapter 14 of Why Buddhism is True.
4. The Truth of the Path to the End of Suffering
The fourth Truth tells us how achieve the Third, how to renounce tanha, become liberated from dukkha and achieve nirvana. This is by following the Noble Eightfold Path, which has eight elements:
Right Understanding or View: accepting Buddhist thinking.
Right Intention or Resolve: commitment to the Path.
Right Speech: speaking the truth courteously, without gossip, slander or abuse.
Right Action or Conduct: peaceful and harmonious behaviour, without stealing, killing or sexual misconduct.
Right Livelihood: making a living in a way that benefits others and avoids specific harms including trading in weapons, poisons or intoxicants.
Right Effort: cultivating positive and wholesome states of mind, and renouncing negative and unwholesome states.
Right Mindfulness: developing fully conscious awareness of the body, sensations, feelings and states of mind, without being absent-minded.
Right Concentration or Samadhi: developing the one-pointed and tranquil mental focus necessary for this awareness.
The eight elements are sometimes grouped into Wisdom (1 and 2), Ethical Conduct (3, 4 and 5) and Meditation (6, 7 and 8). They mutually support and reinforce each other, rather than operating sequentially, and are often represented as a wheel with eight spokes:
The Buddha described the noble eightfold path as like a raft used to cross a river: once on the far side, the raft is no longer needed. This can be interpreted as saying that, once reached, nirvana is a permanent state.
The first five elements are relatively straightforward in essence and no more (or less) difficult than following similar precepts in other religions, for example there is a fair degree of overlap between Right Action and some of the Ten Commandments. The meditation elements are quite different, requiring a rigorous commitment to an ongoing practice and very likely the support of more experienced practitioners.
Personally I have not yet found enough resolve to develop a daily meditation practice, but even moderate and irregular meditation is very beneficial, and has been sufficient for me to have made some progress with Right Mindfulness. For example, I can now usually catch myself reaching for my phone to check it for messages, and can decide consciously not to look at it. With more practice I’m sure I will be able to weaken the attachment further so that I don’t even have to catch myself before acting. Wright reports similar experiences in his book from the early stages of his practice.
Conclusion
The Four Noble Truths are foundational to Buddhist thought, realistically setting out fundamental challenges faced in life in a way that is borne out by evolutionary psychology. Even better, the Truths explain what the issues are, and and how to deal with them, in a way that ultimately leads to the blissful peace of nirvana, whether that’s within this life or across lives.
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