Introduction
As discussed, the Buddha’s First Preaching upon enlightenment involved what are commonly called the “Four Noble Truths.” These are the signature truths of the Buddha, the Noble or Enlightened One.
The Buddha is proclaiming truths, but the primary intent is not to offer a true description of reality but rather an account of how to overcome a predicament in the human condition. In speaking of the Four Noble Truths as ‘truths’, the Buddha is not trying to be a metaphysician or a scientist. The Buddha’s agenda is a practical one. The Four Noble Truths have been described as involving a diagnosis that tells us that there is a problem or malady (pervasive suffering), describes its causes (cravings involving an attachment to self ), prescribes a cure (to eliminate suffering we must eliminate these cravings), and offers a specific means for realiz-ing and practisrealiz-ing this cure (the Noble Eightfold Path). Buddhaghosa, an
important Theravadin1 commentator from the 5th Century (and whose name translates as “voice of the Buddha” in Pali), states: “The truth of suffering is like a disease, the truth of origin is like the cause of the dis-ease, the truth of cessation is like the cure of the disdis-ease, and the truth of the path is like the medicine.”2 The Buddha is regarded more as a physi-cian than a metaphysiphysi-cian, but his concerns with suffering are not quite the same as is the ordinary physician’s (indeed, from the discussion of the previous two chapters, it should be evident that the Buddhist conception of suffering differs substantially from the ordinary physician’s).
As described in the previous chapter, suffering results from cravings.
These cravings are second or higher-order desires; they are desires about desires that seek to satisfy first or lower-order desires, not just for their own sake, but in order to satisfy a self. And in so doing these cravings further entrench attachment to the sense of being a self that exists sepa-rately from the five aggregates. The Buddha, as seen in Chapter Four and as we will see again in Chapter Eight, argues that no such entity exists;
and that all that can be said to exist (with respect to our “selves”) is what can be experienced or encountered in the five ever-changing aggregates.
From the perspective of Western religious traditions, this may be perplexing: what, it may be wondered, is the merit of a religious practice if it does not benefit a self (be it our own self or other selves)? There can be no personal salvation, or eternal life for a soul, or heaven it seems, if there is no self in the form of an enduring independent entity that can reap these rewards. But with Buddhism, there is a set of beliefs and practices that are held to be of spiritual significance, and yet this path is godless, soulless, and without benefit to a substantial self. Buddhism is often regarded as polytheistic, but as with Jainism, appeal to gods or deities is not integral for following the Buddhist path; the end of suffer-ing does not depend on a god or gods as salvation may in other religious traditions. Indeed, attaining enlightenment and the end of suffering
1 Theravada is the oldest school of Buddhism. It declined in India, but is the main religion today in several South-East Asian countries.
2 Visuddhimagga of Buddhaghosa. XVI 87.11., p. 520.
involves the very realization that there is no substantive self. As noted, the First Noble Truth speaks of the nature of suffering, and the Second of its cause, which is craving. The Third Noble Truth speaks of the cessation of suffering, and thus of the overcoming of attachment to self. This is the realization of Nirvana, and this will be the focus of this chapter.
Samsara
‘Samsara’ is a term used to signify the unenlightened existence in which we – that is, the unenlightened amongst us – find ourselves. It is described in terms opposite to Nirvana. It is described as the cycle of birth and rebirth, and as being permeated by suffering, cravings for permanence, sensation, and self. In the Dhammapada, it is described as involving impermanence, suffering and illusion: “‘All is transient.’ …
‘All is sorrow.’ … ‘All is unreal.’”1
Nirvana, the extinguishing of suffering, is the release from Samsara or Samsaric existence. If Samsara is our suffered earthly existence, it might seem that Nirvana should be conceived of as an unearthly or other-worldly existence. That is, the contrary terms in which Samsara and Nirvana are portrayed may convey that Nirvana is a heavenly world or transcendent realm. However, this view of Nirvana conflicts with the Buddhist conception of suffering. If suffering is construed in terms of the first grouping of the First Noble Truth – that is, as involving pain, sick-ness, aging and death – then liberation from suffering should then involve reaching a heavenly or transcendent existence marked by immortality and freedom from physical discomfort and degeneration. But this under-standing of suffering has been shown to not be suffering in the Buddhist sense, and thus Nirvana – the extinguishing of suffering – is not to be understood in these terms either. Likewise, if suffering is understood in terms of the second grouping of the First Noble Truth, then realizing Nirvana would again involve becoming something more than human 1 Dhammapada, Ch. 20, Sections 277-79.
(for it would involve overcoming the desires of human embodiment).
The Buddha’s life is instructive for a correct understanding of suffering:
he is alleged to have overcome suffering, but he did not overcome sick-ness, aging, death, or all desires, and so these cannot be the suffering to be overcome in Buddhism. The understanding of suffering as per the third grouping of the First Noble Truth – that is, as involving craving and attachment to self – has implications for understanding Samsara and Nirvana: namely, Samsara involves craving and attachment to self and Nirvana a release from these.
Samsara is popularly characterized by what is called the ‘Wheel of Becoming’.1 Along the outer edge of this wheel are twelve points depict-ing characteristics of sufferdepict-ing and human existence. These include
1 Also called the ‘Wheel of Life’.
Wheel of Becoming
ignorance, volition, consciousness, name and form, sensory modalities, physical contact, feeling, thirst, grasping, becoming, birth, and aging and death. The twelve elements of the wheel are taken to characterize our unenlightened existence, and include elements from each of the three groupings of suffering from the First Noble Truth. To be in Samsara is to be caught in the cycle of these elements; and to be released from Samsara to Nirvana is to escape attachment to these elements and the cycle of this wheel. Escaping Samsara requires stopping the underlying forces that keep this wheel in motion. These forces are ignorance, grasping and aversion or hatred. These are regarded as the Three Root Evils or Poisons. These forces arise within the aggregate of intentional and voli-tional activity and involve reactions to that which is perceived as pleasing (through grasping) and displeasing (through aversion and hatred). That which is perceived as neutral, as neither pleasing nor displeasing, can result in confusion as no clear reaction may present itself. These three forces are pictured as lying in the interior core of the wheel. These are called root evils because they propagate suffering and maintain the cycle of suffering. They are aspects of our attachment to self. Overcoming suffering, and thus stopping the motion of this wheel, requires coun-teracting the three root forces of ignorance, grasping and aversion or hatred with their opposites: wisdom, generosity and compassion. This is implemented through the practices of the Noble Eightfold Path (which will be described in the next chapter). There is thus a causal under-standing of suffering displayed in the Wheel of Becoming. The twelve elements of the wheel causally affect each other and the three root forces cause the wheel to turn and cause the unenlightened to be bound to its motion and bound within its elements. A similar causal understanding is, of course, displayed in the Four Noble Truths (i.e., suffering is described as caused, and the elimination of suffering is described as involving the elimination of its causes). The understanding of causal interconnectivity is further refined in the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination and this will be discussed in Chapter Ten.
Understanding and Describing Nirvana
The Third Noble Truth asserts that suffering can be eliminated by eliminating its causes, namely cravings. The elimination of suffering,
‘Nirvana’, translates as “extinguished” or “extinguishing,” as in putting out a flame. Referring to the extinguishing of craving and the realization of no self, Nirvana is sometimes construed as involving the annihilation of self. But this is not accurate. The self is not an entity to be extinguished. Instead, it is overcoming attachment to this illusory self that is required. This involves realizing that there is no self, in the sense of an entity existing independently of the aggregates, to begin with. If we are to speak of annihilation at all, it is the annihilation of the fiction or delusion of self, and of the attachment to this fiction.
As noted, Nirvana is not a transcendent place or realm. It is not the Buddhist word for god or heaven. And there is no absolute or monistic reality, such as Atman or Brahman, which is realized with Nirvana. The realization of Brahman is described as involving a realization of the True Self (Atman). Nirvana, in contrast, involves the realization that there is no self in any substantive sense. This is not to deny the utility of the concept of a self, for this allows us to organize thoughts, memories, etc., around the notion of a central agent. Rather, it is to assert that attach-ment to self extends beyond these and other uses.
This attachment to self is displayed in how we think and speak about experiences, including Nirvana. Consider the question: if there is no self who exists apart from the aggregates, then who experiences the aggre-gates? And who experiences Nirvana? It seems that suffering must be felt by a self, and so should the experience of the cessation of suffering. If there is suffering, there must be a sufferer. For Descartes, this reasoning was certain. If there is thinking, doubting, perceiving, as there assuredly are, then, he concluded, there must exist a self or soul who is doing the thinking, doubting and perceiving. Descartes famously concluded cogito ergo sum: thinking implies existence (or, as more commonly translated,
“I think therefore I am”). Descartes reasoned that, even if he was incor-rect and deceived about the content of his perceptions and thoughts,
he must exist to have these deceived perceptions and thoughts; every perception – veridical or not – requires a perceiver, and every thought necessitates a thinker. As long as I am currently perceiving or thinking, for that time I can be certain that I exist.1 Thus, for Descartes, knowl-edge of the existence of self is indubitable.
Note that the self, on this reasoning, must exist independently of the aggregates. This self is independent of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness for it is that thing which has sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and is conscious. It is the experiencer of the aggregates, and so the self must exist independently of the aggregates. It is, for Descartes, the “thinking thing” and exists independently of the thoughts it thinks.
According to Descartes, the self must also not be the body for we can, with some imaginative work, entertain doubts about the existence of the body, but not the self (i.e., my awareness of my body relies on sensa-tions and percepsensa-tions and I may be deceived about these, perhaps by an evil demon, but again, according to Descartes I cannot be deceived by anyone about my own existence for I must exist to be deceived). The self, on this Cartesian view, exists necessarily and independently of the aggregates. Critics, however, objected that it does not follow from the existence of thoughts to the existence of a thinker; it might be that there are just the thoughts. Likewise with perceptions, beliefs, doubts, hopes, etc. We saw a similar response expressed by Hume in Chapter Four. The Buddha, as also discussed in Chapter Four, held a comparable view two millennia earlier. According to the Buddha, the existence of this self is not only dubitable, it is denied. In marked contrast to Descartes’ famous conclusion, the Buddha asserted: “action exists, but no doer.”2
It does seem that thinking requires a thinker, perceiving a perceiver, suffering a sufferer, and the cessation of suffering one for whom suffering has ceased. This is certainly in line with how we speak. It is a feature of our grammar that every predicate requires a subject for a predicate is
1 See Meditations One and Two in Descartes (1993).
2 As quoted in Collins (1982), p. 105. Collins also states here: “The Sanskrit form also implies a deed needs a doer, and this is contested directly by the Buddha.”
what is asserted of a subject. Our grammar (and this applies in English as well as in Sanskrit) implies that there cannot be a predicate, such as suffering, without a subject – the sufferer. However, to say what is grammatically necessary must be necessary in actuality is to say what is necessary of a linguistic description of the world must be necessary of the world. This is fallacious (we may describe this as the fallacy of moving from de dicto necessity to de re necessity).1 Descartes’ inference was, arguably, not a logical necessity but a grammatical one (and given the close connection between rules of grammar and the way we think, his inference was not without cause). Once again, this inference from predicate to subject – from action to doer – is explicitly denied by the Buddha. It is noteworthy that the First Noble Truth presents the truth of suffering as simply: “there is suffering.” It speaks to the predicate but does not overtly ascribe a subject; it does not say “we all suffer,” or “all who are unenlightened suffer.” We might think that if there is suffering, then there must be someone who is undergoing the suffering (and that this someone must exist independently of the suffering he experiences, and independently of other experiences). But the First Noble Truth is careful not to assert the truth of suffering in these terms, since it is the self – or specifically, attachment to self as present in cravings – that is at the root of suffering in the Buddhist conception.
The use of indexical words such as ‘I’ and ‘me’, or proper names, can suggest the existence of selves (for the grammatical role of such terms is to refer, and so it can seem that there must exist a referent to whom they refer). However, in the Buddhist view, a grammatical role should not be confused for existence. The indexical ‘I’ is used in assertions that describe one’s self (e.g., ‘I am hungry’ or ‘I am going out’); and phrases such as ‘my body’, ‘my pain’ and ‘my idea’ function, respectively, to express the possession of a body by a self, the feeling of a pain by a self, and authorship of an idea by a self. This is why, in the third grouping of
1 It is a de dicto necessity that anyone who is your sister is your sibling; this merely follows from the words. But (it’s sometimes argued) the fact that 7 + 5 = 12 is not merely a matter of words: it would be necessarily true (de re) even if there were no words to talk about it.
the First Noble Truth, suffering is summed up in terms of the aggregates of attachment: we attach a notion of I or self to the aggregates, as the possessor and experiencer of the aggregates, while presuming the I or self nevertheless exists independently of the aggregates. These are lin-guistic usages that allow us to express ourselves to others as well as reflect on our own states. However, in the Buddhist view, these useful ways of speaking should not be taken to refer to a separate and underlying self.
Again, the grammar of our speech, and the grammar that underlies our linguistic thinking, may posit or presume a grammatical subject, but the thinking is that this should not be taken to imply the existence of a metaphysical subject. The main difficulty, from the Buddhist point of view, is that even if we have not made this implication explicitly, our attachments – as betrayed in our desires and hopes and fears – suggest we have done so implicitly.
As noted, while we may associate an experience with an experiencer, or an action with a doer, this need not be taken to mean that there is a self who is doing the experiencing and acting. Consider the following:
we may say a pet goldfish is hungry, or that it is swimming in circles, but these associations of a subject with a predicate need not imply that the goldfish has a self. Similarly, we can give the goldfish a name, and while the name refers to the goldfish, it need not be taken to refer to the goldfish’s self. Likewise, a dog might respond to a name, but that does not mean that the dog has a sense of self, in the sense of being something that exists separately from its ever-changing psychophysical aggregates, and that this self is what is responding upon being called. Again, this is not to say that the concept of self is without use or value, or that it should be abandoned. My experiences, memories and more are associated with and organized around a self-concept. My thoughts of others and interac-tions with them, and theirs with me, also deal with this self-concept. All this is useful and presumably necessary for living in the world, for having dealings with others and making sense of ourselves. But in the Buddhist view, this does not imply the existence of a self as an entity that exists separately from the collection of psychophysical states or aggregates of which we are comprised.
To return to the discussion of Nirvana, it is noteworthy that Nirvana is not usually described in positive terms. If it is described at all, it is usu-ally described negatively (i.e., it is described in terms of what it is not, or by what it lacks). A negative description is still a description; it still con-veys information, just as a positive description. For instance, if I say that I am not sleepy then this says something about me. Though it may not say as much, or have as much determinate content, as a positive descrip-tion of my state, such as saying that I am feeling alert. Another example:
directions which tell me not to head West tell me something, but not as much as a positive description of which way I should go (i.e., it does not specifically tell me to head North or South or East, and so may leave me
directions which tell me not to head West tell me something, but not as much as a positive description of which way I should go (i.e., it does not specifically tell me to head North or South or East, and so may leave me