2 Common Misconceptions About Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths
Getting them right is vital for growth.
I’m not a Buddhist. I’m not an anything for that matter.
My MO has been to survey the totality of the spiritual landscape and embrace what makes sense and is useful.
But boy do I love me my Buddhism; specifically, its core tenet of the Four Noble Truths.
Those four are commonly known as:
1) All of life is suffering.
2) We suffer because we desire.
3) If we cease desiring, we eliminate suffering.
4) We cease desiring by following the Eightfold Path.
The crux of it all is that life is rough for we mere mortal Earthlings because we want too much. Get rid of that wanting and we’re golden.
Why am I writing an article on this when most of you aren’t Buddhists? Because most of you, as spiritual seekers, have heard of the Four Noble Truths and have given it some thought.
And there are two concepts that throw people off the scent of its truth which then lessens its value.
Analyzing those two misconceptions is an invaluable teaching in itself, even if you’ve never heard of the Four Noble Truths.
So, let’s get to it.
Misconception #1: Desire isn’t what you think
The first misconception has to do with the word desire. Most Westerners read that and go straight to things like sex and food and drink cravings.
But that is only Kama-tanha, in the Sanskrit, which is just one of the three types of desire that the Buddha teaches are the cause of suffering.
The other two are Bhava-tanha, the desperate urge to be famous, successful, or immortal, and Vibhava-tanha, the urge to escape, destroy, or avoid unpleasant feelings.
In short, most people believe that the suffering caused by desire is limited to things like a guy walking around all day wanting to have sex with every woman he sees or somebody wolfing down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream every night. That’s only a small part of the desire that causes suffering.
My favorite spiritual teacher Michael Singer frequently refers to a quote from the sixth century Buddhist Third Zen Patriarch that replaces desire with a more accurate word.
The quote is:
“The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”
Preferences. Not desires.
It’s about preference not desire
The difference between these two words is significant. Why? Because preference casts a much wider net.
What preference boils down to is wanting things to be a certain way.
Crucially, it also includes things we prefer not to happen, otherwise known as our fears.
So…
I want sex. I want cheese enchiladas for lunch. I want a lemon drop Martini before dinner tonight that has just the right combo of fresh lemon juice and simple syrup to go along with three ounces of vodka.
And…
I don’t want my boyfriend to break up with me. I don’t want to get fired. I don’t want my cancer to recur.
Suffering comes from clinging and resisting
The bottom line on all this? The Buddha meant that suffering is caused by clinging to the things we want and resisting the things we don’t want.
In other words, it’s not just about sex, drugs and rock and roll!
Why is this distinction so critical to understand? Because if we want to eliminate suffering and achieve liberation we need to know that getting there is really about accepting and not resisting what life throws our way.
Misconception #2: How to curb desire
The second misconception about the Four Noble Truths deals with the ‘how to’ of eliminating our preferences/desires. Buddhism teaches the Eightfold Path in achieving this, but that is an involved process followed by committed Buddhists.
Most Westerners who are aware of Buddhism but are not adherents, which is almost all of us, often jump to the logical thought process of:
“Okay, desire causes suffering. So to get rid of it, I’ll just work on not desiring anymore. I’ll curb my crazy ice cream habit by not buying any at the grocery store. I’ll stop eating enchiladas by not going out for Mexican food. I won’t go out at night to curb my lust for women…”
Going straight at curbing desire like this is not that path we want take. Why? Because that’s just suppression and renunciation and it doesn’t work.
It’s about working at the root
What does work? Working at the root, another concept emphasized in Buddhism. Trying to directly curb desire is like cutting off the top of a weed. It accomplishes nothing. To eliminate the weed we need to dig all the way to the root and then remove it.
So what we need to do is dig down to the root of desire. And doing that starts with asking ourselves this question:
What causes us to cling to the things we like and resist those that we don’t?
Ego, ego, ego
It should be no shock to any of you that the answer is…
The ego.
Which is all of the experiences we’ve had in life that were so good that we clung to them or so troubling that we resisted them. Whether we clung to or resisted them, those experiences got stored inside us as little pockets of energy that run our lives.
Examples?
“I had countless experiences throughout my life of people complimenting me on my beauty that, now in my 50s, I’m clinging to that by getting every cosmetic surgery in the book and starving myself to keep my figure.”
“My parents’ marriage and divorce was so ugly and tempestuous that I resisted all those terrible feelings, and therefore held on to all of them because I didn’t let them pass through. Now I’m forty and still haven’t had a relationship that’s lasted longer than a few months.”
Fine. So the ego is what causes us to cling and resist. What do we do?
Let go, let go, let go
We let go of the ego.
How?
That beauty queen? Every time she looks in the mirror and feels that pang of ‘less than,’ she closes her eyes, relaxes around the feeling that has arisen…and lets it go.
Every day. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year.
Same for the relationship-phobe. Every time he gets in a relationship and starts to get feelings of panic, all of which trace back to his boyhood, he relaxes around those feelings as best he can…and lets go.
Every day. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year.
By letting go of all that baggage, both of these people will, ever so gradually, start to cling and resist less and less.
And, as Noble Truth number three states, their suffering will diminish.
The takeaway
To recap:
1) Desire is far more than sex and ice cream. It’s about wanting things to be a certain way, which involves resisting and not accepting what life brings our way.
2) We don’t curb our desires directly, but by letting go of what causes them in the first place: The ego.
Bottom line: The more we let go of our egos, the less we prefer everything to be a certain way. And the less preferring we do, the less suffering we experience.
Over and out.