Part One: The Four Noble Truths - The Central Core of Everything the Buddha Taught.
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On at least two occasions, the Buddha said that all he taught was dukkha and the ending of dukkha (MN 22; SN 22:86). This means that if you want to understand his teachings, dukkha is a good word to know.
Its primary meaning is simple enough-pain-but it covers all levels of pain, from acute physical suffering and mental anguish to subtle levels of stress in very refined, even blissful, states of mind. Unfortunately, there’s no single English word that can encompass all these levels of intensity. Fortunately, though, the fact that we have separate words for pain, suffering, and stress helps to clear up some of the difficulties that the Buddha faced, given that his language had only one word to cover all these things. In the course of this book, I will usually translate dukkha as suffering, but occasionally I’ll use pain or stress where they seem to fit better into the context.
The main point to remember, though, is that dukkha is the primary focus of everything the Buddha taught. If you’re interested in solving the problem of suffering, then his Dhamma, or teaching, is where to look. If you’re interested in other issues, you can look somewhere else.
In his first talk, the Buddha taught that the path to the end of suffering started with right view concerning four noble truths: suffering, its origination, its cessation, and the path to its cessation.
Here, too, it’s good to look at the words the Buddha used for “truth” and “noble”: sacca and ariya.
The early Buddhist texts define sacca as whatever is undeceptive and doesn’t turn out to be other than what it seems. The way the texts use this word shows that a “truth” can mean either (1) a fact as a reality in and of itself or (2) an accurate statement about that reality. This double meaning is important to keep in mind for two reasons. The first is that it’s directly related to the solution of the problem of suffering. In the search for an end to suffering, you’re looking for accurate statements that describe how to reach the reality of suffering’s end. The second reason is that the Buddha made statements about truth that sometimes seem contradictory if you assume that “truth” can be only a reality or only a statement. But once you realize that the word has these two meanings, the seeming contradictions disappear.
And not only that: Understanding the Buddha’s insight into the relationship between pain as a reality and the words inspired by that reality, helps you understand how best to make use of the four truths in practice.
23 авг 2024