Returning to the Roots of Mindfulness — Steve Hagen on The Four Noble Truths
Three core insights, a path of action, and a personal caveat
About 20 years ago I took a class about the Four Noble Truths from Steve Hagen. I still find his explanation of the Four Noble Truths to be the most penetrating and useful. So, I cleaned up my class notes and offer them below as a gift to you. To learn more, check out Steve’s book Buddhism Plain and Simple — the best introduction to this spiritual path that I’ve ever found.
The First Noble Truth: Dukkha exists
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that dukkha exists. Unfortunately, the word dukkha is untranslatable. It is often rendered in English as discomfort, dissatisfaction, or suffering. But this misleading. Even sukkha — satisfaction, pleasure — falls within the realm of dukkha if we cling to it.
We’ll better understand dukkha when we remember two things.
First, dukkha points to the fact that our experience is pure flux. We ignore this fact, however. We try to make pleasant experiences last forever and unpleasant experiences end forever. As a result, we are constantly at odds with reality.
Second, dukkha can end. You’ll often see the First Noble Truth rendered as “life is suffering,” but that’s inaccurate. The whole message of Buddhism is that dukkha is optional. The rest of the Noble Truths explain how to realize this.
The Second Noble Truth: How Dukkha Arises
According to the Buddha, the source of dukkha is craving — grasping at pleasure and resisting discomfort. This insight is liberating: Craving is an “inside” job. It is something that we add to our experience, something that we do. And, we can stop doing it.
The Buddha talked at a deeper level about how craving arises. He explained its relationship to five basic core elements of our moment-to-moment experience — the five aggregates:
Matter is physical form, including the human body. However, craving is ultimately about mind, not matter. The other four aggregates are all aspects of mind.
Perception is pure awareness of our moment-to-moment experience without any effort to describe it or change it. At the level of pure perception, there is just one unbroken stream of experience. Nothing is separate from anything else.
Sensation is our physical experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. Sensations exist on a continuum from pleasant to neutral to unpleasant.
Conception is thinking and identifying with ideas. Conception separates perceptions and sensations into hard-and-fast dualities — self versus other, past versus future, and many more.
Intention is motivation — moving toward the things we like and moving away from the things we dislike. Over time this hardens into longing and loathing, hatred and greed — craving.
In summary, craving is a movement from perception to sensation, conception, and craving. We take the unbroken stream of experience, divide it into dualities, and cling to the objects of our desire.
Fortunately, there is an alternative to this movement, as the Third and Fourth Noble Truths explain.
The Third Noble Truth: How Dukkha Passes Away
The Third Noble Truth is that when craving ends, dukkha ends. When we accept the impermanent nature of all things, we are liberated. We see that it’s pointless to grasp at any experience with the hope of making it permanent. We understand the futility of clinging to anything that constantly changes.
Third Noble Truth reminds us that Buddhism is not a religion in the traditional sense. Buddhism is not based on belief in God — or belief in anything else, for that matter. The Buddha urged us not to believe anything he said. Rather, he asked us to test the teachings and verify them for ourselves.
The Buddha was not interested in winning debates or creating grand intellectual schemes. He was interested only in one thing: The end of dukkha.
The Fourth Noble Truth: The Path
The Fourth Noble Truth is that we can live in a way that allows craving to pass away. This way of life is called the Eightfold Path:
Right view is understanding the Four Noble Truths.
Right intention is a strong resolve to awaken to the end of dukkha — the strength of intention you’d have if your hair were on fire and you wanted to put it out.
Right speech is avoiding deception, rudeness, crude conversation, and speaking ill of others.
Right action is compassion in action, which follows from releasing craving and selfish intention.
Right livelihood is making a living in ways that do not harm other people.
Right effort in meditation avoids the extremes of laziness and exhaustion by following a “middle path” — being relaxed and alert at the same time.
Right concentration is the ability to focus attention during meditation.
Right mindfulness is to using attention see impermanence at work in the present moment.
Please note a few things:
The Eightfold Path is not a journey to future destination. To practice the path is to be liberated now, in the present moment.
Each step in the path begins with the word right. However, this word is not used in the sense of right versus wrong. Right in this context means effective and in tune with reality.
Though we list the elements of the Eightfold Path as separate steps, they are deeply interconnected. To take any step is to practice the whole path at once.
A personal caveat
Buddhist teachers often describe nirvana as the end of suffering. However, nirvana is not eternal bliss, a Buddhist form of the Christian heaven, or a final and ultimate experience.
After years of meditating and studying Buddhism, I’m still far from daily bliss. I still suffer. In the presence of extreme discomfort, I find it almost impossible to stay concentrated and mindful.
And yet something’s changed — often in a small way but always significant. Tony de Mello said it well:
“Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.” But there’s a difference: I don’t identify with it any more.
I don’t talk much about nirvana any more. Instead, I talk about lightening the load and getting 10 percent happier, as Dan Harris says.
Hell, even a 1 percent swing makes a difference. It’s enough to keep me on the path.