by Joan Gattuso
on the human condition, then his diagnosis,
then the prognosis, and finally the cure.
—EKNATH ESWARAN
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
THERE ARE SO MANY “secrets” being revealed today. There is the land-mark work The Secret. Although interesting and inspiring, it certainly does not contain any hitherto unknown esoteric secrets. Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich offers numerous secrets that, if you discover them, will lead you to wealth and fulfillment. In recent history there have been any number of books that offer the secret to success, the secret to happiness, the secret to perfect weight, the secret to raising brilliant children, the secret to brilliant career moves, the secret to attracting a loving partner.
What is it with all these “secrets”? Are they really secrets at all, or is the secret simply to throw out the bait and see how many looking for a quick fix will grab the minnow? My colleagues and I chuckle and wonder why something is called a “secret” when it is something we have known and taught for decades. A minister friend of mine says, “People can feel important and special if they believe they are being let in on a secret that others don’t know.” He’s right, in my opinion, and certainly book publishersand authors (including me) will use whatever ploys and hooks are needed to sell books and sell lots of them.
In Buddhism there are treasures, often called “precious jewels,” but they are not necessarily secrets. In my understanding all the hyperbole about secret teachings pales in the light of the magnitude of the eternal truths contained within the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path, which are followed by thousands of advanced teachings available to the true seeker.
In Tibetan Buddhism there are deep teachings given only to advanced practitioners, usually monks and nuns, after years and years of study. The master teacher decides if the student is ready, and only then is this deep, complicated material taught. That is not what The Lotus Still Blooms is attempting.
Although the teachings on these pages are not swaddled in hype and the promise of a quick fix and easy riches, they do, as the Buddha taught, point the way to awakening and enlightenment. They outline a path to embrace and walk that begins to answer life’s profound questions, not just for a moment but for all time. Hopefully these lessons will inspire you as you begin to practice and learn these eternal truths. Hopefully they will give you tools and formulas that are applicable to absolutely every aspect of life. They are not secrets but truths. They are without equal. They are fabulous and thrilling. They are the Four Noble Truths. They are noble because they are without equal. They are truths because these four are perhaps the greatest summation of the mystery enfolding human existence. They contain the diagnosis, the prognosis and the cure for the human condition.
Here is the answer that was first taught 2,600 years ago by the Buddha. It still excites me to the extent that my heart rejoices. I am enlivened to share these truths with you. They are clearly and succinctly stated so that you may understand them and perhaps change your life.
So let us begin at the beginning.
This beginning of Prince Siddhartha’s life-changing journey would
When the Buddha was still known as Prince Siddhartha, he journeyed for the first time outside the protection of the palace walls and saw what is called “the four sights of the Buddha.” What he saw was:1. An elderly man. The Prince had no knowledge of aging, be it a person, animal or flower, since he had been totally sheltered from all perceived negativity by his father, the King.
2. A sick man. He was stunned when he saw him and asked his companion Chonna, “What is wrong?” Chonna explained, “It is the law of nature that we are all prone to sickness. Poor, rich, ignorant or wise, we are all creatures with bodies and so susceptible to disease.”
3. A dead man. The Prince had never witnessed death. Explained Chonna, “He who begins life must end it.”
4. An encounter with a monk who had a begging bowl. Again Chonna, “He has understood that beauty will turn to ugliness, youth into old age, life into death. And he is looking for the eternal, looking for that which does not die.”
turn his world upside down, as it has done for the millions who have followed the Buddha’s teachings through the aeons. The Buddha vowed, as he sat in meditation under a bodhi tree, that he would not arise until he achieved enlightenment, the supreme state of absolute transcendence and clarity. And that is what occurred.
After achieving enlightenment, the Buddha rose from under the bodhi tree and in a serene spot delivered his first message to a small band of future followers. This has come to be known as the Deer Park Sermon, where the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma (the body of spiritual teaching) took place. This is where the Buddha first taught what would become the essential teachings of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths.
Many have allowed the first Noble Truth, “Life is suffering,” to frighten them and have been unwilling to look further. When properly understood and taken within the context of the entire four, it is not frightening, it is enlightening. Here are the four:
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
1. Life is suffering.
2. The cause of suffering is our own grasping and clinging, our attachments to our desires.
3. Cessation of suffering is possible.
4. Presentation of the Eight-fold Path that leads to the end of suffering and promotes well-being.
The wise and scholarly have noted that the 84,000 teachings found within Tibetan Buddhism can be summarized by the Four Noble Truths. It takes real willingness to look at the first Noble Truth in order to become aware of another way and to recognize that this spiritual truth is your reality. Life contains suffering. Many are experiencing suffering at this very moment. Pick up any newspaper, turn on the evening news, look deeply at the lives of those around you, look deeply into your own life. Suffering will be found at every turn, because suffering is an inescapable fact of life, because life and its pleasures and ills are impermanent.
In magical thinking we wish the good and pleasurable aspects of life would last forever, just like the noble prince’s father, the King. Nothing on our bodies would ever sag or wrinkle, our children would always adore us, our parents would never grow old and die. Nor would we grow old and die.
The entire subject of impermanence is often ignored by metaphysicians, somehow caught up in the magical thinking that—if we do not look at the unsettling aspects of life such as disease, aging and death as the Buddha saw on his first journey beyond the palace walls—undesired events will not occur in our lives. This is not a psychologically sound way to approach life, yet many are caught in such upside-down thinking.
The Buddhist teaching is that our attempt to avoid all aspects of life is the cause of our suffering. By acknowledging the full spectrum of our human experiences, we take the crucial first step toward alleviating our suffering.
When we are willing to mature in our thinking, we can then begin to understand that life is always in a state of flux. Everything is always changing in the world. The only aspect of life that does not change is the absolute—call it God or Christ nature, your Buddha nature, the Holy Spirit. We must draw our strength and find refuge from and in the Divine. All else is impermanent.
I attended a ten-day retreat based on the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche and his magnificent book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The retreat was held at a lovely lodge in a bucolic setting in Northern California. I personally had gone through much effort and expense to get there, traveling more than six thousand miles in the middle of a long-awaited, three-month sabbatical.
On the first day of the retreat the approximately 350 retreatants learned that Sogyal Rinpoche had been hospitalized as soon as he arrived in the United States from Europe. His senior students would carry on in his stead. There was much disappointment, myself included, but surely he, a Rinpoche and recognized spiritual master, would be well quickly and released from the hospital to assume his role as leader and teacher.
But that did not happen. He was rel
eased after several days, but he was in need of rest and recuperation. He telephoned the retreatants and spoke very mindfully on impermanence and the nature of illness. He implied that even the great ones can get sick. He said, “Illness is a kind of warning, a reminder. We believe we have time, we believe we have time, we believe we have time—and then we have no time.” He was living for us all in what he called “the ever-present theme of impermanence.”
When we embrace the universality of impermanence, we are then no longer thrown off our pins when it stops to pay a call in our life or in the life of a loved one. Do you sometimes look in the mirror and see your mother’s face looking back at you? That’s impermanence. Can you barely get out of bed in the morning because of all your many aches and pains? That’s impermanence. A child gets sick and dies. That’s impermanence. A young soldier does not return from Iraq. That’s impermanence. The most glorious vacation comes to an end. That’s impermanence. You now live in an “empty nest” where your nuclear family once lived. That’s impermanence. The examples are endless, and each one causes us to suffer to the degree that we are attached.
Take some quiet time and consider how impermanence has arisen for you personally and how you have met it. You might want to take a moment to reflect on five major events that have impacted your life. If it causes you to be fearful, release that in meditation over and over. Know that even in the midst of great change, you remain safe because of your eternal connection with God, with your Buddha self, with your Christ self. You and your Divine self are one, and that can never change. That is permanent, and how blessed you are when you realize that this is so.
THE FIRST NOBLE TRUTH
During that retreat Sogyal Rinpoche said that the First Noble Truth could be better understood by limiting your thinking to “life is suffering.” It is not simply that life causes us to suffer, but rather “samsara” is suffering.Samsara is this delusional world we have been conditioned to see as real, but it is not real. It is the endless cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth over and over again. The Dalai Lama called samsara “unenlightened existence.” And when we insist the world be what it is not, we cause ourselves to suffer. Why is life—samsara—suffering? It is because nothing in this world is permanent. When we recognize rather than deny the fact of impermanence and its tie to suffering, we have taken the first step.
THE SECOND NOBLE TRUTH
The Second Noble Truth is quite logical. We experience suffering because we cling, grasp, have unmet expectations, have addictions. A while back I saw a TV feature on women addicted to plastic surgery. These weren’t the common eye lift, face-lift or tummy tuck. These women had dozens upon dozens of surgeries. One young woman still in the bloom of her youth at twenty-nine had had more surgeries than her age.
I am definitely one for taking the best care that we can of our physical selves. But no matter what we do, we are—as the years roll by—getting older, having a sickness or two or more, perhaps experiencing an accident or two. And each one of us is going to die, as well as everyone you love. Cling to this not happening and you will just suffer all the more.
THE THIRD NOBLE TRUTH
The good news begins with the Third Noble Truth, the cessation of suffering. There is a way out, since suffering is not our eternal fate. If we are willing to look deeply at the nature of life, we can rise up and truly experience happiness. On a number of occasions I have heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama say that the purpose of life is to be happy. The happy life begins when we realize that life is boundless. This can only come as the result of looking deeply at what is, rather than what we wish it to be.
THE FOURTH NOBLE TRUTH
Here is the really good news! The Fourth Noble Truth explains how we can achieve happiness through engaging fully in the Noble Eight-fold Path. Here we find the cure to our suffering. We can call it “spiritual medicine” or “soul medicine.” We must ingest this medicine and take the teachings out of the textbooks and into our hearts and lives.
Remember, clinical observation of the Four Noble Truths can be summed up as the diagnosis, the prognosis, the cure, and engaging in the cure. Buddha did not teach the extinction of all desire (trishna). Our desire can become zeal, enthusiasm toward our spiritual awakening. Nothing is overcome (i.e., desire) by crushing it, only by transforming it. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Dr. Robert Thurman said, “We can each become a noble person, and all of us are destined to do so.”
I had a conversation on wanting good and pleasant experiences in my life with my Hawaiian cardiologist, Dr. Hinson Chun, a Tibetan Buddhist. He said, “Of course we must have pure ‘desire’ to ever make progress on the Eight-fold Path.” When we engage in the cure, we move into the Eight-fold Path. It is how we can systematically cease doing what causes us to suffer and embrace the eight steps that lead to a noble life and happiness.
All that I am is the result of all that I have thought.
—BUDDHA
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday,
and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow:
our life is the creation of our mind.
If a man acts or speaks with an impure mind,
suffering follows him as the wheel of the cart follows
the beast that draws the cart.
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday,
and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow:
our life is the creation of our mind.
If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind,
joy follows him as his own shadow.
—THE DHAMMAPADA, VERSES 1-2
INTRODUCTION TO THE EIGHT-FOLD PATH
THE EIGHT-FOLD PATH, the Fullness of the Fourth Noble Truth, offers a timeless blueprint for living the spiritually realized life. It was first offered by the Buddha at his very first sermon, called the “Deer Park Sermon,” delivered at Benares, India.
Here for the first time the Four Noble Truths were presented, followed
As the Buddha introduced his first teaching on the Middle Path, he instructed the monks as follows:1. Now this, monks, is the noble truth of pain: birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection and despair are painful. Contact with unpleasant things is painful, not getting what one wishes is painful. In short the five groups of grasping are painful.
2. Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the cause of pain: the craving which tends to rebirth, combined with pleasure and lust, finding pleasure here and there; namely the craving for passion, the craving for existence, the craving for nonexistence.
3. Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of pain, the cessation without a remainder of craving, the abandonment, forsaking release, nonattachment.
4. Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the way that leads to the cessation of pain: this is the noble Eight-fold Way; namely Right View, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.
by the Eight-fold Path, which are really the steps of the Fourth Noble Truth. Again they are: Right View, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.
A chapter has been created for each, illustrating how each has been applied in my life and how I have in turn taught its value and use to others. Each of the eight chapters offers practical, real-life examples, along with exercises to assist the reader in integrating each step into his or her own life.
The first two steps, Right View and Right Thought, give the reader the preliminary conditions that must be established in the individual’s life in order to make further spiritual progress. The third, fourth and fifth— Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood—speak of one’s willingness to align these most important aspects of life with one’s spiritual intentions. Here the practitioner learns to live his life consistent with this high aspiration. Also, the foundation is laid to progress to the final three— Right Effort
, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.
These final three are the fundamental conditions necessary to progress toward ultimately achieving an awakened mind or enlightenment.
The Eight-fold Path is a methodical process for moving toward an enlightened state of being using spiritual tools to get there. Tibetan Buddhism has preserved the enormous treasury of what is original Indian Buddhism, the studies of the ultimate nature of being. To attain Buddhahood /Christhood requires a radical shift in consciousness. Buddhism teaches that the old paradigm has to go. Suffering, victimhood and separation become union, empowerment and oneness when one spends years, if not lifetimes, studying and practicing Buddhist principles. The Eight-fold Path is key to this growth.
If an individual has a calm state of mind, that person’s attitudes and views will be calm and tranquil, even in the presence of great agitation.
—HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA
RIGHT VIEW
RIGHT VIEW IS THE first point on the Buddhist Eight-fold Path. Here is where one begins the journey of living as a Noble Being. What exactly is a Noble Being? It is one who cares for others as much as she cares for herself. This requires a huge shift in consciousness, an enormous shift in perception. You are saying: “Others are as important as I am.”
In this section a road map is presented, giving you tools to a path that, when followed, offers you an awakened state of consciousness. We can study, practice and come to know these eight points on a soul level. It is not sufficient just to know them intellectually. We must integrate their wisdom into our very essence. We must have our inner beliefs so joined with these ancient truths that we even dream them. Then we can begin to move into a more awakened consciousness and live our lives in a more conscious state.
