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Thank you for joining us
on the Skeptical Buddhists Channel.
Star here again in Second Life.
This week we'll walk around the Mao SIM
to visit the very detailed build
of the Great Wall of China.
Our goal was to cover
the three “Marks of Existence”
that the Buddha taught:
impermanance;
that everything contains the seeds of suffering;
and not-self.
We saw how the self was impermanent
and how everything impermanent
has no “self” --
that is, has no inherent identity
that can completely describe it
at every moment all across time.
In other words,
“things change”.
In this last part of this three-part miniseries
we will cover the rudest concept,
that everything in the whole world
and beyond
is all made up of suffering.
Well okay, not really,
but that's the way I hear it described,
usually by people attempting
to denigrate the Buddha's teaching,
but sometimes even by professed Buddhists
(who need to sit down
and read the suttas,
very slowly).
Let's begin with a new word
for our Buddhist vocabulary list:
dukkha.
Dukkha is the word
that gets translated as “suffering”
but like so many Buddhist words
it isn't really comfortable
being confined in one little box like that.
It covers such a broad range of experiences
that it's not possible to define it
with just one English word;
it's a contextual word.
It's grief: the misery you feel
when your pet dies.
It's anguish: the confusion you feel
when you get home
and your mate has packed bags
and left without notice.
It's rage:
when you see gross injustice in the world.
It's frustration:
when you get back from refilling your tea
and find the cat has gotten the ball of yarn
and unravelled three days worth of stitches
in your latest project.
All that – and more – is dukkha.
And here's another example of dukkha.
Last time I gave an example
of a sexy little car
breaking down on the way to work.
We considered how we define things
as being fixed in their identities
and how we sometimes get a rude shock
when things don't behave as we think they should,
like that car
which has lost an essential part of its “car-ness”
– the “go” component –
and this makes us angry.
Because our definition was too small
to fit the reality of a changing matrix
of metal and rubber,
gasoline and mechanical theory,
we got caught off-guard
by it acting in unexpected ways.
It might look, on the surface,
like the stupid car is causing us to suffer,
but it's not the car,
it's our expectation that's the problem.
If we weren't relying on it
to perform flawlessly,
we wouldn't be encountering dukkha.
The good news about this
is that it's not really
that everything in the known universe
is made up of dukkha;
it's that our fixed concepts
of everything in the known universe
are dukkha.
This is good news because
if the problem was inside the things –
or even inside the concepts themselves --
we'd have no way out.
We'd just suffer.
But because the problem
is in how we relate to things,
in how we think about things,
we have a course of action we can take
to free us from that pernicious anguish
that runs throughout our lives.
Both impermanence and “not self”
are interwoven into this reasoning
about what causes us
so much pain and frustration.
Impermanance is part of the problem
because if the car just stayed like it was
when it left the factory floor –
full tank of gas, new tires,
everything working --
it would never break down and frustrate us;
but it is impermanent,
so it does run out of gas or break down
or need expensive new tires eventually.
“Not self” –
if stretched to cover the fact
that a car has no self either,
no fixed and permanent,
unchanging identity –
the “not self-ness” of the car
is saying that we need to see
that it does not have a fixed identity;
it is in flux and changing.
Looked at this way,
we can see that all three concepts –
impermanence,
suffering inherent in all things,
and not-self –
are really one big truth
about the way things really are.
There is one other insight
related to these three concepts,
which is that we should notice
that not only do things out there
have “no self” in themselves,
they are also not part of “our selves” –
this could be the sixth aggregate
to add to the five listed two episodes back:
that we often see as part of ourselves
that which we possess --
a very materialistic view,
and one that most of us
have the insight to exclude
from our “sense of self”
and yet we still do this
by adding our preferences for possessions
and the kind of company we keep
to our “self”.
For example, I own horses
so I am “a horse person.”
I have sometimes seen
this second of the three marks of existence
changed,
so that the list becomes:
impermanence,
contingency,
and not-self.
“Contingency” stands
in the place of “dukkha”
which makes sense
if we can just consider what is being said.
Let's reconsider what makes “dukkha” –
suffering – happen.
This broad-ranging anguish
is caused by our tendency to see
people, things, and concepts
as fixed and immutable
when they are not.
Nothing will stay within the confines
of our limited views of them
because they change,
and they change because
they are dependent on outside factors.
Nothing comes into existence
separate from anything else
– pop! – spontaneous generation!
No, everything comes into existence
due to causes,
and having pulled little pieces
from this and that to form itself –
which means every thing is contingent
on other things for its existence
and it is this contingency
that will make things change,
early or late,
at some time it will change.
So it can be said
that what causes us to suffer
is the contingent nature of all things.
Really it's not that the world is contingent
that causes us to suffer –
again,
it's our unconscious assumption
that things will remain
more or less as we define them;
our clinging to our views of things
that causes the problem –
but that the contingency
or impermanence is the problem,
is sometimes how it is stated.
I've gone into
the concept of “contingency” here
because there is one possible exception to
“all things depend
on others for their existence”
but to go there would require a leap of faith,
which is not something
Buddhism really requires.
To solve this conundrum
will take a separate episode,
so until next time,
Namasté!