Further, the Buddha was not saying that everything about life is relentlessly awful. In other sermons, he spoke of many types of happiness, such as the happiness of family life. But as we look more closely at dukkha, we see that it touches everything in our lives, including good fortune and happy times. Among other things, the Buddha taught that the skandhas are dukkha.
The skandhas are the components of a living human being: form, senses, ideas, predilections, and consciousness. In other words, the animated body you identify as yourself is dukkha because it is impermanent and it will eventually perish. The Second Noble Truth teaches that the cause of suffering is greed or desire. The actual word from the early scriptures is tanha, and this is more accurately translated as "thirst" or "craving.
We continually search for something outside ourselves to make us happy. But no matter how successful we are, we never remain satisfied.
The Second Truth is not telling us that we must give up everything we love to find happiness. The real issue here is more subtle; it's the attachment to what we desire that gets us into trouble. The Buddha taught that this thirst grows from ignorance of the self.
We go through life grabbing one thing after another to get a sense of security about ourselves. We attach not only to physical things but also to ideas and opinions about ourselves and the world around us. Then we grow frustrated when the world doesn't behave the way we think it should and our lives don't conform to our expectations. Buddhist practice brings about a radical change in perspective. Our tendency to divide the universe into "me" and "everything else" fades away.
In time, the practitioner is better able to enjoy life's experiences without judgment, bias, manipulation, or any of the other mental barriers we erect between ourselves and what's real. The Buddha's teachings on karma and rebirth are closely related to the Second Noble Truth. The Buddha's teachings on the Four Noble Truths are sometimes compared to a physician diagnosing an illness and prescribing a treatment.
The first truth tells us what the illness is and the second truth tells us what causes the illness. The Third Noble Truth holds out hope for a cure. What are the four noble truths? Life always involves suffering, in obvious and subtle forms. Even when things seem good, we always feel an undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty inside.
The cause of suffering is craving and fundamental ignorance. The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.
Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs. The Buddha went on to say the same of the other four senses, and the mind, showing that attachment to positive, negative and neutral sensations and thoughts is the cause of suffering. The Buddha taught that the way to extinguish desire, which causes suffering, is to liberate oneself from attachment.
Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard the truth sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful- nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.
Nirvana means extinguishing. Attaining nirvana - reaching enlightenment - means extinguishing the three fires of greed, delusion and hatred. Someone who reaches nirvana does not immediately disappear to a heavenly realm. Nirvana is better understood as a state of mind that humans can reach. It is a state of profound spiritual joy, without negative emotions and fears. When he finds estrangement, passion fades out.
With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: 'Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.
After death an enlightened person is liberated from the cycle of rebirth, but Buddhism gives no definite answers as to what happens next. The Buddha discouraged his followers from asking too many questions about nirvana. The concept of pleasure is not denied, but acknowledged as fleeting.
Pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. The same logic belies an understanding of happiness. In the end, only aging, sickness, and death are certain and unavoidable.
The Four Noble Truths are a contingency plan for dealing with the suffering humanity faces -- suffering of a physical kind, or of a mental nature. The First Truth identifies the presence of suffering. The Second Truth, on the other hand, seeks to determine the cause of suffering. In Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering.
By desire, Buddhists refer to craving pleasure, material goods, and immortality, all of which are wants that can never be satisfied. As a result, desiring them can only bring suffering. Ignorance, in comparison, relates to not seeing the world as it actually is. Without the capacity for mental concentration and insight, Buddhism explains, one's mind is left undeveloped, unable to grasp the true nature of things.
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