To the Far Shore

I know a Western monk who trained in Thailand and after several years he went home to visit his family. His brother asked him, “All those years you’d been spending as a monk, what did you learn?” And the monk said, “Everything changes.” The brother said, “Duh, of course.”

Yet the teaching that everything changes—everything fabricated, everything put together, is impermanent, inconstant: It is an important teaching. The question is, why is it important?

To see how it’s important, you have to see that it fits into another bigger teaching, which is the teaching on the four noble truths. Ven. Sāriputta once said that if you want to understand any skillful quality, any skillful teaching, you have to put it in the context of the four noble truths, because the truths are not just truths about suffering. They’re categories in which you can sort out all your thoughts, sort out all your experiences.

One category is stress, suffering. Another category is the cause of suffering, which the Buddha identified as craving. The suffering, he said, is clinging that comes from the craving. Then there’s the cessation of suffering, which comes when you can abandon the craving through dispassion. And finally there’s the path to the cessation—these are the practices we follow.

Each of those truths has a duty. The duty with regard to suffering is to comprehend it. That means to understand it so well that you get beyond any passion, aversion, or delusion around it. The duty with regard to the cause of suffering is to abandon it. The cessation of suffering is something you should realize, and you should do that by developing the path.

When you use the four noble truths to divide things up in this way, it’s so that you can know what to do with them in line with the duties of the relevant truth.

Say, mindfulness arises. You want to make it right mindfulness, so you develop it in that direction. Then you want to make it stronger, which means it’s something you develop. When sensual desire comes up, it’s something that causes suffering, so that’s something you want to abandon.

This gives you the framework—an idea of what to do with whatever comes up. Now, that duty to abandon the cause of suffering and to comprehend suffering itself as clinging: That’s where the teachings on what are called the three characteristics come in, because you’re trying to develop dispassion for the cause of suffering and some dispassion for the suffering itself.

You might not think that you’re passionate for suffering. But as the Buddha said, the things we cling to, the act of clinging: That’s suffering. And the clinging is something we do because we like something. We think we’re going to get something out of it, so we keep doing it again and again and again.

We have to learn how to see that we’re not getting the satisfaction we hoped for.

The same with craving: We crave things because we think they’ll bring happiness. We have to learn how to see that they’re not bringing us the happiness we want.

So, in cases like that, the Buddha gives some training in how to develop dispassion so that you can abandon the cause of suffering. There are five steps. If something unskillful comes up in the mind, you want to see it as soon as it comes, so that you can see what’s causing it—what incites it. The Buddha uses the word samudaya, which translates as “origination.” When he uses that word, he’s usually talking about causes coming from within the mind itself. So, say, when sensual desire comes up, he doesn’t want you to focus on the object outside that got you excited. Instead, he wants you to see: What was the tendency in the mind that wanted to get excited to begin with? That’s what you want to look for. That’s the origination.

Then you want to see that the mental acts that originate these unskillful mental states come and go, come and go. So you want to see them when they go. Because sometimes when you get angry about something, the anger is there for a while and then it disappears. You lose interest. You find something else more interesting instead. But then you go back to the anger.

You may notice that the hormones that got released when you were angry are still there. They’re still having an impact on how you experience your body. So, you want to be able to distinguish the thought of anger from its physical results. All too often when we sense those physical results, we think, “I must still be angry,” so we pick it up again and run with it some more.

But if you can see the distinction—that the thought of anger and the physical results are two different things—that helps to loosen your attachment to the anger. You begin to see that the mind’s choice of these unskillful attitudes is pretty random. And you do have the choice. You can pick these attitudes up or not.

So, if you pick up anger like that, the next step you want to see is: What’s the allure? What does the mind like about anger? We may tell ourselves that we don’t like anger, we see the bad effects it has in other people’s lives, and we can see that it’s having a bad effect on our own lives, but as long as you don’t understand why you like it—or part of the mind likes it—you won’t really be able to let it go. So you have to look for the allure.

Then the next step, the fourth step, is to compare that allure with the drawbacks: that if you go with the anger, what’s going to happen, what kind of results are you going to get? Are they going to be worth it?

This is where the three characteristics—or more properly the three perceptions—come in. You can see that whatever benefits you get from the anger are inconstant. They’re not reliable. And because you can’t rely on them, you can’t find any real happiness there. So, they’re stressful. And when they’re unreliable and stressful, do you really want to claim them as you or yours, as belonging to you? When you can see that the drawbacks really do outweigh the allure, that’s when you let go. That’s when you develop the dispassion—the fifth step—which is the duty with regard to the second noble truth.

So that’s where this teaching on inconstancy fits in. That’s why it has meaning. It’s in the context of the four noble truths.

You see that unskillful mental states are really preventing you from being truly happy, and you want to find some way to get past them. So, contemplating them in terms of their being inconstant, stressful, and not self helps loosen your attachments—because it’s in the context of the four noble truths that these three perceptions actually have meaning. If you didn’t understand that the craving causes suffering, or the clinging is the suffering, you could easily say, “I might as well hold on. What’s wrong with holding on?” And if you think this is all you’ve got in life, you’ll hold on even more.

If you take the three characteristics or the three perceptions just on their own, you could come up with all kinds of ideas about what to do. Things are impermanent, things are stressful, so if you get a little bit of pleasure, hold on to it: That could be one conclusion. Or as they say in the old drinking song, “Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we may die.” In other words, you try to grab whatever pleasures you can in what little time you have. Those would be reasonable attitudes to adopt from the fact of inconstancy if you didn’t take into consideration the four noble truths.

But when you see things in terms of the four noble truths, where the Buddha says, true happiness—the cessation of suffering—comes when you abandon all your passion for craving, all your passion for clinging, then those three perceptions have meaning. You realize that they’re a way to perform the duties of the four noble truths and to get to that third noble truth, which is the total end of suffering.

Of all the truths, that’s the most important. If the Buddha was just making some observations that there is suffering in life, things are inconstant, stressful, not self, and if he just left it there, one of the messages might be, “Well, just learn how to accept things—that this is as good as they get and don’t try very hard to get them any better than this.”

The image they sometimes give when they teach it this way—and you do find people teaching this way, claiming that it’s Buddhism—they say it’s like sitting on the shore of an ocean watching the waves come in. Big waves come in, little waves come in, gentle waves come in, destructive waves come in. There’s nothing you can do about it. Just realize, okay, they come and then they go and they’re just doing their wave thing. Do you get upset about the strong waves? You can’t do anything about them. You’re getting upset to no purpose at all. So just learn how to accept them. Stay where you are on the shore and watch the waves come and gom and learn how to be happy that way.

That’s one of the ways you could interpret those three characteristics—or those three perceptions—if you didn’t have the context of the four noble truths. But with the context of the four noble truths, you realize that you’re suffering because of your own passion for your craving. If you learn how to develop dispassion, and the Buddha gives you this five-step program—seeing how your cravings are caused as they come into being, seeing how they pass away, seeing their allure, seeing their drawbacks, and through comparing the allure with the drawbacks, seeing that the drawbacks way outweigh the allure—that’s when you can develop dispassion. That’s when you’re free. After all, that’s the purpose of these perceptions: to set you free. But it’s all within the context of the four noble truths: That’s how they can do that, and how they make sense.

They’re not just a “duh” teaching. They’re very insightful.

So, any way that you can see the drawbacks of the things that you cling to, the things that you crave, it’s all going to be useful. Some people get most impressed by the fact of how unreliable the happiness that comes from craving is. Some people get more impressed by the fact that there really is some stress, even in the things that you really, really like—the fact that you have to hold on to them, keep them going. They find that that impresses the mind more.

Other people find that when you realize that these things are not totally under your control—sometimes they give good results, sometimes they don’t give good results, but the results they give are never as long-lasting as you’d like: Why hold on to them, why claim them as yours, when you know that by letting go there’s an even greater happiness?

So, always look at the Buddha’s teachings in terms of these four noble truths if you want to make sense out of them—and to get the best use out of them. After all, they are meant to be used. The Buddha wasn’t the sort of teacher who would just say, “Well, this is the nature of the world” and ask us to admire his view of the world. He was more interested in solving a problem, the problem that drives all of us—which is that we’re causing ourselves suffering through our actions and we don’t have to do it. That’s the whole focus of his teachings, and all the teachings he gives come with that purpose. They’re for you to use on your own suffering, on the events of craving in your mind, clinging in your mind.

Think of the teachings as tools. Or in the Buddha’s analogy, they’re like a raft. You’re on this side of the river. It’s a dangerous side, with a lot of suffering. On the other side of the river there’s safety. There’s no bridge across the river, and there’s no boat to come and pick you up.

So you have to take the twigs and branches and leaves on this side of the river, bind them together with the vines you find on this side of the river, and make a raft. Then, making use of that raft, you swim across to safety. When you get to the other side, you can put the raft away. You don’t have to carry it on your head.

But notice what that raft is made of. It’s made out of things on this side of the river: your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, the things that you cling to. Yet you find that if you put them together in the right way, as you are when you’re getting the mind in concentration—you focus on the breath to create a feeling of ease, you use the perception of the breath filling the body, the ease filling the body, you think about how to improve the breath, to make it more comfortable, how to maintain that sense of comfort, and then how to spread that sense of comfort throughout the body, and then you’re aware of all these activities: That’s taking all the things that you cling to and turning them into a path, turning them into the raft.

So, instead of asking you to sit by the ocean watching the waves come and go and not being able to do anything about them, the Buddha is giving you something you can do. Take what you’ve got, learn how to use it skillfully, and you can get yourself across to true safety.

That’s the image you want to hold in mind.