He abused me, mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me –
Harbouring such thoughts keeps hatred alive.
He abused me, mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me –
Releasing such thoughts banishes hatred for all time.

The Dhammapada

To forgive someone is commonly seen as sort of wiping a slate clean after being wronged. The idea is that, when someone wrongs you, you are owed something by them. Or, more often, that you owe them some kind of unpleasantness. And when you forgive them, you’re giving up that debt.

Revenge is based on the same sort of notion: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Gandhi noted that “an eye for an eye” meant everyone ends up blind.

So forgiveness is seen very much as an active thing, a deed, a decision you make. Having been wronged, you make up your mind to forgive them, and having done so, you are owed the forgiven party’s thanks. If they do not express their appreciation for your forgiving them, they’ve wronged you again, and you can forgive them again for bonus points.

As taglines for movies go, there are worse.

The thing is, this attitude towards forgiveness actually reinforces the illusion of separation. You can only forgive someone in this way if you are separate from them – they’ve done something to you, you’re doing something back to them. Really, whether your response to being wronged is revenge or forgiveness, it’s still a response of one being to another.

And that’s fine, from one perspective. Forgiveness is a nice gift to give, and it can inspire the recipient to pass it on. Forgiveness given like this can end a cycle of retaliations. All good.

There’s another kind of forgiveness, though, that isn’t so much a choice. It comes from your perspective. If you see clearly that everyone’s actions are products of long chains of cause-and-effect, you realise that those actions are, in a sense, inevitable. And you see that if you had lived exactly their life until this point, with all of their experiences and genetics and circumstances, you would be acting in exactly the same way as they are.

With this perspective, a kind of forgiveness is inevitable. How can you blame them for something that is inevitable? How can you actively forgive someone for something that is inevitable? Instead what you have is understanding.

Of course, you may not know enough about someone to be able to explain their actions. Why they are acting like they are may be a complete mystery to you. But even then, you can realise that if you knew everything about them, you would not be able to help but forgive them. That can be enough.

In fact, when you see more deeply into the sources of your own suffering in life, you start to realise experientially that when we wrong people we are usually acting from a suffering mindstate. Happy people, free people, aware people do not try to hurt others. To harm another is the act of a suffering person.

So, if you realise that, you will in fact have compassion for those who wrong you.

Of course, you can’t fake this understanding. Usually when we’re wronged, we feel angry and we want revenge. The ego wants to protect itself. But we can act as if we saw clearly, until our practice deepens to the point that we do. We can refuse to take revenge, and we can observe that desire for revenge in ourselves and learn from it, watch it from all sides, trace its roots, and find that – like so many things – it dissolves away in the harsh light of awareness.

The Noble Eightfold Path is often represented as an eight-spoked wheel.

So the Fourth Noble Truth of the Buddha was the actual cure for suffering. In other words, the Fourth Noble Truth of the Buddha was basically “being Buddhist”, and how one was to be a Buddhist was spelled out as the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path should not be understood as a progressive series of steps, sorting out one and then moving on to the next. Instead, each of the eight elements mutually support each other – like so many things in Buddhist, to practise one of them properly is to practise all of them, in a way.

Each element of the Eightfold Path starts with the word “right”, which many people feel compelled to comment on, but I think that it’s a pretty sweet translation and gets the point across pretty well.

So, without further ado, the Noble Eightfold Path consists of…

Right Understanding

Fairly obvious – being a Buddhist involves believing the right things about the world, and seeing the world in the right way. This division of the Eightfold Path works on several levels, most particularly the intellectual and intuitive levels. What I mean is, it’s all very well to intellectually accept Buddhist claims about the world, and that does count as right understanding, at the deeper level there is that intuitive change in understanding that comes from insight in meditation.

Right Intention

This one’s basically being dedicated to liberation from suffering, dedication to ending suffering, not having your motivation split between worldly goals and spiritual goals. Of course, as one’s practice deepens, motivation naturally becomes a bit purified and it’s easier to distinguish between right and wrong intention in oneself.

Right Speech

Even though the next division is “Right Action”, Gautama gave speech a category all of its own. That’s apparently how important speech was to his ethical concerns. What constitutes Right Speech is provided in Buddhist scriptures both in a negative sense (what not to say) and a positive sense (what kind of things to say). For example, rather than just saying, “Abandon divisive speech,” Gautama follows it up with, “Thus reconciling those who have broken apart or cementing those who are united, he loves concord, delights in concord, enjoys concord, speaks things that create concord…”

There’s sort of a dual function to Right Speech. On the one hand, what kind of things someone says and to whom is a strong indication of where they’re at in their head – compassionate words tend to come from a compassionate mindset, abusive words tend to come from a deluded mindset. On the other hand, indulging in those words that cause division and suffering or are just idle chatter and gossip – that act of unthinking speech actually reinforces the mindset that gives rise to them. That same observation holds true for the next division…

Right Action

This is another sneaky place for fitting in more elements than was on the list’s title, really. Buddhism has a foundation for moral conduct in the “Five Precepts”, which will be addressed more fully in a separate post (when will it end?!) Basically, though, Right Action is that conduct that is both reflective of and encourages an undeluded mindset – which happens to also be an infinitely compassionate mindset.

Right Livelihood

The Buddha also laid down rules for what kind of jobs were acceptable to work. Well, mainly what’s unacceptable. Here’s the list.

Trading in weapons
Trading in people – including slavery and prostitution
Trading in meat – including raising animals for slaughter
Trading in intoxicants – drugs and alcohol
Trading in poisons

An example of Wrong Livelihood

Of course, it wouldn’t be hard to extend these 2600-year-old professions to a slightly broader collection of modern-day professions. Poisons could include work in the tobacco industry. Intoxicants could include tabloid magazines and reality TV. And so on. The general theme here is that Buddhism emphasises considering the full possible and probable consequences of your actions.

Right Effort

Right Effort is sort of a matter of consciously cultivating those habits of deed and mind Gautama called “wholesome” and culling those habits he called “unwholesome”. How is it different from Right Intention? Maybe Gautama just liked the number eight. No, don’t worry, I’m kidding. As far as I can tell, Right Intention is about having the right goals, while Right Effort is about striving actively to become the kind of person who can attain those goals.

Right Mindfulness

“Mindfulness” is such an important concept in the practice of Buddhism that it’s probably going to get its own article too, but it’s worth giving a quick summary here. Right Mindfulness is the activity of being aware, in the present moment, of whatever feelings, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, etc., are arising in the practitioner – and observing them without judgement, without attachment or revulsion. It is the primary activity of the Buddhist meditation practice called “vipassana”.

Right Concentration

In one way, this can seem like the culmination of the other seven divisions in the Eightfold Path – various states of deep concentration or “jhanas” in meditation. And, in another way, it’s the foundation of all of the others.

Putting Them All Together

A practising Buddhist, then, is someone who agrees with the Buddha’s basic observations about life; is motivated by compassion and a desire for liberation from suffering and ignorance; speaks, acts and makes a living in unharmful, compassionate ways; actively cultivates wholesome qualities; practises Buddhist meditation and attains insight from that meditation.

There. That doesn’t sound so hard, now, does it?

In short, the Four Noble Truths are:

1. Suffering exists.
2. Suffering is caused by attachment to desires.
3. Suffering ceases when that attachment ceases.
4. Suffering can be stopped by practising the Eightfold Path.

Which seems a bit like cheating, because the fourth Noble Truth contains an eightfold path, etc. But apparently at around the time of Gautama, physicians used a similar formula when approaching diseases – 1) identify the disease; 2) identify its cause; 3) identify whether or not there’s a cure; 4) identify the cure.

1: Suffering exists

Also quoted as “life is suffering”. It’s interesting that in Gautama’s time, this Noble Truth was so obvious as to barely be worth saying. Life for almost everyone in the time of the Buddha was short and brutal, compared to life for those in privileged sectors of advanced industrialisation (such as anyone reading this blog). It’s easy to forget that for the majority of life on earth, “life is suffering” is more transparently and obviously true.

You'll never guess what the Sanskrit word for "impermanence" is...

That’s not to say that the observation doesn’t hold true for we privileged few. Despite our wealth, we are still faced with the inevitabilities of sickness, old age and death – not just for us, but also for our loved ones. Certainly the severity of some of our sufferings are ameliorated by modern science and technology, and we have vastly more means of distracting ourselves from future inevitabilities, but in the end we cannot avoid suffering.

Even when we’re experiencing any of a range of pleasures in life – good food, interesting dreams, sex, falling in love, the birth of our child, spiritual highs, chemical highs… Even then, none of them last forever, and we’re often aware either consciously or unconsciously that these too shall end.

It’s worth noting too that Buddhism came out of an Indian context where it was taken for granted that death meant reincarnation, and that good karma resulted in a more pleasant rebirth and bad karma resulted in a less pleasant rebirth. So death provided no release from the inevitability of suffering, in Gautama’s view. Neither did accumulating enough good karma to be reborn in a heaven realm, as that karma would eventually be burned off and birth in more painful realms would result.

This is not the Circle of Life you're looking for. Move along.

Though those three sights which spurred Gautama’s quest originally – disease, old age, death – were inevitable natural sources of suffering, there’s also the vast array of evil that human beings visit upon each other. Not only is there the obvious suffering caused by violence, but also the less direct consequences of economic systems that deprive people of clean drinking water, food and other necessities. The Buddha’s concerns about suffering included man-made suffering too.

2: Suffering is caused by attachment to desires

In investigating the cause of suffering, Gautama ended up detailing a vicious cycle of cause and effect that makes suffering inevitable for most people. Traditionally there are 12 interrelated steps along this path towards the arising of suffering (“dukkha”). Summing it up briefly makes it sound like a quote from the appalling Star Wars prequels, but here goes:

Ignorance leads to mistaken impressions. Mistaken impressions lead to preferences. Preferences lead to clinging and craving. Clinging and craving lead to suffering.

That’s a pretty simplified version. What each of those vague terms really mean, and how they cause each other, is a much larger story, but I’ll see if I can explain briefly.

I’ve tried to explain the doctrine of not-self (anatta) elsewhere. Not-self means there is no “I” or “we”, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use those terms. We labour under the mistaken impression that we exist as something individual that persists from one moment to the next. When we are under this mistaken impression, we identify with transient impermanent things, like our bodies, our feelings, our beliefs, our memories, our social status, etc. When we identify with these finite, unsatisfactory things, we set ourselves up for suffering when they don’t last or we don’t get what we want.

Additionally, because we identify with these little things, we try to grab more little things to prop them up and make them last longer, getting greedy. We get frustrated and angry when we can’t get more of those things we’ve decided we want. We get afraid when those things with which we identify are threatened. This greed for things, anger at not getting them, and fear of losing them are the causes of most inter-personal suffering: people hurting other people.

Identification with the body and fear of it being threatened seems fairly obvious. But consider identification with a nation (patriotism/nationalism) or identification with a skin colour (white pride) or with a religion or with a sports team or a political party or a political philosophy (anarchism included). When that thing with which we identify is insulted, or questioned, or threatened, we take it personally and react defensively. The White Pride guy identifying with his skin colour actually suffers when he is in the presence of someone he doesn’t consider white. The Muslim feels personally attacked when the existence of God is questioned. And the anarchist gets hot under the collar when someone puts him on the spot and asks just how his beliefs could ever be put into action.

So all of these identifications cause suffering, because they’re based on (and they feed into) the idea that we are separate individuals persisting from moment to moment.

3: Suffering ceases when the attachment ceases

The third Noble Truth is just that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there is a way out, that liberation is possible. Liberation from suffering is possible because Gautama discovered an effective means of chipping away at a particularly vulnerable link in that causal chain I mentioned above. In other words, liberation is possible because ignorance can be replaced with insight.

Now, a quick word on that. Recognising intellectually and rationally the truth of not-self is not the same as being enlightened and liberated. The kind of change that has to occur is at a more intuitive level. Understanding the reasoning behind not-self isn’t a bad thing, but until a concrete experiential change has occurred in the way someone sees the world, all they are is a deluded person saying, “I don’t actually exist!”

An intellectual appreciation of a philosophical position will not stop life from being suffering; nor will it dissolve greed, fear and anger; nor will it dissolve those patterns of behaviour that cause suffering in those around us. To quote the Bible, “by their fruits you will know them”.

Or, to quote the Dhammapada…

A careless person, quoting much of the scriptural text, but not living it
Cannot share the abundance of the holy life,
Just as the cowherd, counting other people’s cattle,
Cannot taste the milk or ghee.

Reciting a small portion of the scripture,
But putting it diligently into practice,
Letting go of passion, aggression and confusion,
Revering the truth with a clear mind
And not clinging to anything, here or hereafter,
Brings the harvest of the holy life.

Which brings us to the question: just what is Buddhist practice that is supposed to be able to make such a fundamental change to the way one views the world that it brings into question whether there’s one viewing the world at all in the first place?

Well, that would be the fourth Noble Truth, also known as the Eightfold Path, and I’m afraid that will be getting a Buddhism 101 post all of its own.

(Interestingly, you’ll sometimes find both Buddhists and Christians telling you that their religion is “not really a religion”, possibly in an attempt to distinguish theirs from all of the other ones. Dictionaries remain unchanged by such assertions.)

But I figure the best way to explain Buddhism plainly is to speak briefly about its history, then briefly about its beliefs, then briefly about the practices based on those beliefs. And then! Back to more history, more beliefs and more practices. Trust me, I’ve been over this in my head. You can’t talk about the Buddha without then explaining what realisations make him a Buddha. Then you can’t talk about what makes him a Buddha without talking about what’s supposed to make other people into Buddhas. Then you can’t talk about Buddhist practices without acknowledging that there are different schools of Buddhism, which you can’t do without talking again about the history of Buddhism.

To do any of them justice, I have to do all of them justice, eventually. So, without further ado…

A Brief History of the Buddha (Part One)

Contrary to popular belief, this fellow is not the Buddha. He's a wee fat Chinese man.

So here’s the story of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. 2500 years ago, Gautama was born the son of a local chieftain who was, presumably, doing pretty well for himself. Gautama lived a protected upbringing (in some versions of the story, intentionally protected by his father) and it wasn’t until he was around 29 that he saw four things that shook him: a sick man, an old man, a corpse and a monk.

Those first three sights taught him about the inevitability of suffering in life – we all get sick, we all get old, we all die. This disturbed Gautama, and he saw it as a problem that needed to be resolved. The fourth sight, that of a holy man who had renounced material wealth, gave him the notion that there were at least other folk trying to work this stuff out too.

So he left his life, which happened to include his wife and newborn son, and set off to work out some kind of solution to inevitable suffering, not just for himself but for everyone. He wandered about, studying under various spiritual teachers, proving an excellent student but eventually finding each teacher to be unsatisfactory.

As was the fashion among monks at the time, he practised extreme asceticism, allegedly getting so thin that he could feel his spine from the front of his belly. After passing out and almost drowning, he had a brief insight that maybe starvation wasn’t the key to success. He started eating a bit better, to the disappointment of his ascetic friends. Then he sat down under a tree and vowed never to leave until he’d sorted the whole deal out. His friends left in disgust, figuring he’d gone off the rails into worldliness and had given up the holy path of starving yourself to death.

Mythologically, during this time he was tempted by various gods and demons to leave the path he was on, and he ignored them all. You can pretty much take this as expressions of how he was personally tempted at times to give up. Or you can believe in various gods and demons. It doesn’t particularly matter.

There he is, the silly goose.

Then, 49 days later, sitting under what came to be known as the bodhi tree, Gautama attained enlightenment and became worthy of the title “Buddha”.

Like “Caesar”, “Christ” and “The Doctor”, it’s a title, not a name. Well, maybe it’s a name for the Doctor. “Buddha” is a title meaning “Awake One”. When people talk about the Buddha, they’re generally referring to Gautama, as opposed to any other sentient being who happens to be fully enlightened. Certainly Buddhism acknowledges the potential, and often the reality, of there being many Buddhas, many sentient beings who are fully enlightened.

And here we have to pause, because we’ve hit a term that needs to be explained: enlightenment. So from history/legend we’ll move into basic Buddhist doctrines, in the next thrilling installment of Buddhism 101: Four Noble Truths. (Probably tomorrow.)

There is suffering, but none who suffers
Doing exists, although there is no doer
Nirvana exists, but no one who attains it
There is the path, but no one who walks it.

Visuddhimagga 16

Start with the view that how we carve up our world with concepts and words is arbitrary, though generally practical.

The arbitrariness is fairly obvious in some cases, such as the borders between countries. For example, we know that with a bit of process and high-level agreement – and some complaints from cartographers – state borders could be moved and Hartford, South Dakota would become Hartford, Nebraska.

Less obvious is the arbitrariness in the borders between physical things. There’s a book on the desk in front of me. I consider it to be a separate identifiable thing. I could pick it up and put it in the bookcase and refer to the whole bookcase, including the book, as a separate identifiable thing. That’s not too controversial; it’s just a thing full of things, or a thing made up of things.

The book itself, of course, is a thing made up of things. There are a few hundred pages of paper inside. Ripping one out would not prevent me from calling it a book. (Ripping them all out might.) So the book is kind of a thing of things, too. And within the pages, of course, are atoms, so they’re things of things too.

But the book is on the desk. I consider it to be a separate thing from the desk by convention, and because I can pick it up and read it. But while it’s sitting on the desk, there’s nothing stopping me from treating the book and desk both as a single object: bookdesk. The bookdesk is in front of me, made up of atoms, etc. I can move the bookdesk with a gentle shove.

Okay, so I can’t. I just tried. Let’s pretend I’m much stronger.

We can keep expanding this out. The bookdesk is on the floor. So we have floorbookdesk, all one thing. My chair is on the floorbookdesk, so I’m sitting on the chairfloorbookdesk. And so on. I can expand these arbitrary divisions out to include the whole room. The whole room, a single thing.

That includes the air, of course. And it includes me.

For a great many perfectly good reasons, I consider myself to be a separate thing too. The thing that just failed to shove the bookdesk. Silly puny thing. And I generally consider all of these other things to be outside of myself. I’m sitting on, in front of, under, near various other things, things outside of myself. I see them, feel them, interact with them.

The lines between me, or my body, and these other things, my environment, are actually a bit more obviously fuzzy than the distinction between the book and the desk. I’ve been breathing air in and out, maybe nibbled at a granola bar, skin cells have been quietly flaking off. Pretty constantly, things “outside” have been coming in and things “inside” have been going out.

But anyway, we’re considering the whole room as a single thing, and that includes me. So what was previously me breathing external air in and internal air out, oxygen molecules making their ponderous way up to my brain, etc., is now simply something that the room as whole is doing.

From the previous perspective, I was breathing air in and out. From the new perspective, the room is breathing. Breathing itself, if you like.

Now, how do we approach the question of perception from this new perspective?

Before, I was looking at the book in front of me, just as I was breathing the air outside of me. We generally think of sight as something outside (light) bouncing off something else outside (the book) and entering me through my eyes to the inside (retina, brain, whatever you like).

But now the whole room is a single object. Before I was breathing air in and out. Now the room is breathing itself, or simply doing breathing. Before I was seeing the book in front of me. Now the room is seeing itself, or doing book-seeing.

If I close my eyes, I stop seeing the book. Or, if the room does eye-closing, the room stops doing book-seeing. So the arrangement of the room determines whether or not it’s doing a seeing. Certain arrangements (eyes open, lights on, book within field of vision) give rise to book-seeing. Certain arrangements (eyes closed, lights off, oxygen cut off to brain) do not give rise to book-seeing.

In this arrangement, who is book-seeing? The room is a single object in such a configuration that it gives rise to an event of book-seeing. Book-seeing occurs, the room is doing it. And the angle from which the book is seen, the colours, its position relative to its background, possibly even its immediate significance are all seen from “my” perspective. The room is book-seeing-from-Hakunin’s-perspective.

But the fact that this particular perspective is a quality of the book-seeing event doesn’t change that it is the whole room, the only object we’ve defined, that is performing it. And if the room object was arranged slightly differently, the perspective quality of the book-seeing event – its angles, its lighting, its colours – would be slightly different.

So the arrangement of this single object, the room, gives rise to an event of perception, and the things that previously seemed so important and separate (me, the book, perhaps the light) become just qualities, just flavours of the event of perception to which it happens to give rise.

That seeing, that perception, previously seemed like a tenuous link between two very real separate things, things that are there whether or not one sees the other. Now both the seer and the seen become qualities – more like the shape and colour of a thing than like a thing themselves.

Before, Hakunin was in a room looking at a book on a desk, light from the lamp bouncing off one thing and on to another. Now, the room is doing a Hakunin-style-book-seeing.

Of course, it was equally arbitrary for us to draw the lines at the borders of the room. The lamp, whose aspect of the arrangement is integral to the book-seeing, is being powered by the city grid, which is in turn powered by a hydroelectric dam, whose dynamos are turned by water, which precipitated after being evaporated by the heat of the sun, which is eight light-minutes away. That light and heat from the sun is, in a small measure, influenced by the gravity of the other stars in the galaxy, whose position is itself a product of a confluence of forces extending to include the entire universe.

It may not be particularly useful, but it is nonetheless true, that if the nearest black hole was a few inches to the left, this room’s book-seeing would be imperceptibly different.

When you expand these boundaries out to the limits, to include the universe, to include everything, you are left with the observation that this event of book-seeing, at this very moment, is given rise to by the arrangement of everything that is, and due to the causal chain of everything that ever was.

And even though it’s a book-seeing-from-Hakunin’s-perspective, it’s a book-seeing-from-Hakunin’s-perspective that is performed by the entire universe. “My” location, “my” concerns, “my” perspective of the book are simply qualities of that event.

Perception, then, is a non-local event. It doesn’t occur in any particular place. My perception of this book and your perception of these words are both events being performed by the entire universe, not taking place here in my seat and there in yours, but both being performed nowhere and everywhere. The same arrangement of everything that gives rise to my perception of the book is the arrangement that gives rise to your perception of these words.

This may seem interesting but an impractical, irrelevant way of looking at things. But according to Buddhism, it is ignorance of this perspective – not intellectually, but intuitively – that is the root cause of all suffering. This is, in a roundabout way, the doctrine of anatta, or “no-self”.