The Four Noble Truths
Legend has it that around 500 B.C., Siddhartha Gautama, an Indian spiritual seeker, reached enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree in northern India. He became known as the Buddha and shared his first teachings, the Four Noble Truths. In this post, we’ll look at the first of these teachings and discuss the others in future posts. Until recently, the teachings were presented as follows:
- Life is suffering (dukkha).
- Attachment and aversion are the root causes of suffering (samudaya).
- There is a way to end the suffering (nirodha).
- The Middle Way / Eightfold Path is the way out of suffering (marga).
Misunderstandings of dukkha
In the past, the original Sanskrit and Pali teachings were not accurately translated, leading to dukkha being seen as a very negative view of life. Because of this, many early commentators dismissed the teachings, thinking they rejected life itself. I used to share this misunderstanding too, seeing dukkha as not life-affirming. More recent interpretations, like those by Walpola Rahula [1], have helped correct this and reveal the true meaning of dukkha.
The True Meaning of Suffering
Put simply, the real meaning is closer to ‘life contains suffering.’ In this context, suffering means struggling to cope with or grieve the difficult changes that happen in life. Like ancient Hindu and Chinese traditions, the Buddhist framework also sees change as a central part of life. However, not all change is welcome change. Buddhist mythology shares the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s encounters with the changes associated with sickness, old age, and death, which led him on a spiritual quest to become the Buddha. We can experience or imagine all kinds of physical or emotional losses that can happen. Whenever we feel a sense of loss, there is grief – a mix of emotional and physical reactions that take time and effort to work through. Sometimes, we can’t fully process our grief, and we get stuck in these feelings. This is what the Buddhist tradition calls suffering. In short, when we fail to successfully grieve life’s difficult changes, we can become emotionally stuck, which is labelled as suffering. The Buddhist tradition goes on to identify various levels of acceptance and letting go as tools for dealing with this suffering.
Grief and Modern Psychotherapy
Western psychotherapy now also recognizes the important link between grief processing and treatment of mental disorders. One well-known model of grief comes from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying [2]. In this model, Kübler-Ross identified five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as the steps towards dealing with grief. The pros and cons of this model have been debated by many commentators; however, I want to highlight the similarity with the traditional framework of acceptance as the final stage of the process. Mindfulness, which is a secular version of the Buddhist framework (which itself was a secular version of the Hindu framework at the time of its formation), is a part of many Western psychotherapy models. These models use strategies such as radical acceptance as helpful tools to cope with grief and reduce emotional distress.
The Central Role of Grief
Still, grief processing does not hold as central a place in modern Western psychotherapy as it seemed to do in traditional systems. It’s worth asking if this central focus on grief helped traditional approaches stay connected to their healing goals, and whether modern methods sometimes miss the bigger picture. This idea will be explored more in future blog posts.
References:
- Rāhula, W. (1974). What the Buddha taught. Grove Press.
- Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying: What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families. New York, NY: Macmillan.
