Buddha’s first teaching was the Four Noble Truths: the four truths, facts, for the noble ones: there is suffering; there are causes; you can get rid of suffering and its causes; and then how to do the job.
And, of course, it’s another way of saying, “What is happiness and what are its causes?”
The first of these truths is that there is suffering: three levels of it: 1. the suffering of suffering; 2. the suffering of change; 3. all-pervasive suffering.
And, simply speaking, each of them is eradicated by practicing what’s taught in the three scopes of the lamrim, Tsongkhapa’s packaging of all of the teachings in the vast body of knowledge that tracks back to Lord Buddha: the lower scope of practice, the middle scope of practice, and the great scope. I like to call them junior school, high school, and university.
In junior school we learn the methods to give up the suffering of suffering. That’s the kind of suffering we all understand, what everybody in the whole world understands: when the bad things happen. It’s a simple way of putting it, and we all know we don’t want that one.
There are different ways of talking about the first level of suffering, such as the different realms of existence, but here we’ll stick to just the bad things happening in a human life.
Buddha’s analysis of what causes the bad things to happen – and good things, by the way – is our doing those things ourselves, the law of karma being that everything anyone thinks or does or says sows seeds in our mind that will just naturally ripen in the future as those experiences. It’s a pretty straightforward analysis.
Therefore in the first level of practice Buddha exhorts us to not kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t badmouth, don’t this, don’t that – a little list of ten don’ts – and the first seven of these are actions of body and speech, which are ones that harm others.
It’s like when you go to your doctor:
“You don’t want cancer?” she says to me.
“No.”
“Then stop causing it.”
“And what’s causing it, doctor?”
“Smoking cigarettes. So give up smoking cigarettes.”
Buddha says, “You want to get killed, lied to, stolen from?”
“No, thank you.”
“Then you better stop causing it.”
“What’s the cause, Buddha?”
“Doing those actions yourself.”
It’s pretty simple, not complicated. That’s the first level of practice, which is the level of good ethics: don’t harm others.
Now, the second kind of suffering is more subtle, and actually it’s a bit shocking for us: what Buddha means by the “suffering of change” is what we mean by happiness – when the nice things happen! This needs thinking about. This really does need thinking about!
What are the causes? Attachment. This word attachment is very cute and simple in the English language, so we have to understand exactly what Buddha means by it, because it’s not our analysis at all.
Attachment is the junkie mind in us: craving, constantly wanting something more, never satisfied. It’s the mind of a junkie – and we’re all junkies, Buddha says, as long as we’ve got attachment. The heroin that attachment wants is whatever object it is that we think will, by having contact with it, bring pleasant feelings.
It’s actually a bottomless pit that simply cannot be satisfied.
The first kind of suffering is when attachment doesn’t get what it wants: when you’re hungry for the heroin, when you’re freaking out because you can’t get it. The second kind of suffering, the suffering of change, is when you get what attachment does want.
We all know, and Buddha agrees, that contact with the sense objects does trigger pleasure, so why does he call it suffering? Because the happy feelings don’t last, which means they turn into the suffering of suffering.
He’s saying to us, “Haven’t you noticed, sweetheart, that when you keep eating cake, waiting for more happiness to come, more happiness won’t come? Vomiting will come. If you keep eating cake, you’ll eventually vomit.”
This is the suffering of change. It’s a subtler, more nuanced level of suffering, so we’ve got to understand it properly.
And the tragedy is that not only does getting the object not bring satisfaction – driven by the attachment, we utterly believe that satisfaction will come! – it leads to even more dissatisfaction, more craving. As my mother would say, “The more you get, the more you want.”
How to give up this second kind of suffering? By giving up attachment in the second scope of practice – high school.
The third kind of suffering, all-pervasive suffering, is like we’re born in the body of a junkie, which means having the five senses; and we’re born in a world made of heroin, and merely to exist, we have to ingest it.
We’re living in this universe with the five senses, driven by attachment, driven to get satisfaction via the five senses, and, just to exist, we have to ingest the external world, which is the objects of the five senses. That’s all-pervasive suffering.
We’re completely pervaded by it: our senses, our body, the universe itself – all are the product of past attachment and by following attachment now we never-endingly produce future bodies, future realms of suffering.
So how do you give that one up?
You give up the first kind of suffering by stopping harming others: first scope of practice, junior school.
You give up the second one by giving up attachment: the second scope of practice.
You get rid of the third one – and therefore all suffering – by realizing emptiness, which is taught in the Six Perfections in the great scope, the Mahayana component of the path. You quit being born altogether: you quit samsara.
And because the realization of emptiness is achieved alongside bodhichitta, we don’t just achieve our own nirvana, our cessation of suffering and its causes, we also become a buddha – and now we will happily choose to be reborn to be of benefit to others.
It’s one step at a time: junior school, high school, university – then graduate.