Nibbana Is Better than You Think

The Buddha said that he taught just suffering and the end of suffering. Suffering is the problem he focused on and he proposed to solve it. First he was able to solve that problem inside himself. Then he taught other people to solve it within themselves.

It seems fairly simple. You look at all the suffering in the world, and it’s obvious that it’d be really good that people not have to suffer. You see war, famine, induced war, induced famine. The things that happen in even just the human world are pretty bad, and there are realms where it gets a lot worse. So, any teaching that offers an end to suffering would seem to be something that would appeal to everyone.

Yet when the Buddha talks about the implications of what it means to put an end to suffering, when he talks about nibbāna, a lot of people say it doesn’t sound all that appealing.

Years back, when I gave my first study weekend here in California, the topic was the four noble truths. You get to the third truth before you get to the fourth. The third truth is the end of suffering. We talked about it a bit and then we talked about the fourth truth, and finally we got to the right concentration in the fourth truth: pleasure and rapture throughout the body. A number of people said, “The path sounds better than the goal.”

That’s because we’re on this side of the path. In other words, we haven’t completed it yet. We haven’t reached the end. The Buddha asks you to reserve judgment because you’re looking at things through distorted eyes.

We live in a world where there’s always suffering, so our minds are active, doing what we can to get away from suffering. We keep on doing a cost-benefit analysis. You put in an effort: Will it be worth it? We feel that if it’s worth it, it has meaning.

But in nibbana, there’s no activity. There’s no doing at all, no need to do anything at all. So, there’s no act of balancing the effort against the goal. Questions of meaning become meaningless. Listening to that from our side of things, it doesn’t sound all that attractive.

But as the Buddha said, if you think that there’s anything negative about the experience of nibbana, that would be wrong view. So, reserve judgment. Take it for granted that the ability to put an end to suffering would be a good thing. An incredibly good thing. Then, when you get there, you can look around for yourself.

As the Buddha said, that’s as far as he’s going to teach you. From that point on, you’re free: free to do as you like. Once you’ve solved this problem, you’ve solved the major problem in life. Then you pass judgment from that side, with new eyes.

From our side, we have to be careful, though, because sometimes things get a little bit comfortable and we get lazy. This is one of the ironies of samsara. We work hard, hard, hard to get things comfortable, but then as soon as they’re comfortable, we get complacent. You don’t have to look for the heavenly worlds to see this. Just look at the human world when things get comfortable. Not even the human world, the dog world. If dogs are well-fed, they just lie around as if there were nothing better to do in life.

In the human realm, as we start getting lazy, start getting complacent, the good qualities we needed to develop to get to that comfortable spot start eroding away.

If you go to the heavenly realms, it’s even more obvious. Imagine what life is like there: You think of wanting something, and there it is. Want something else? There that is. You can imagine how that can really corrode your character. You get lazy. You get demanding. You get a strong sense of entitlement.

But it’s not going to last. You eat up all the good things you’ve done and then you fall. This is why, when the Buddha was introducing the four noble truths to lay people, he would start out with the goodness of generosity, the goodness of virtue, saying that these things do have meaning.

But then they get rewarded. Many people who are generous, many people who are virtuous, go to the heavenly realms. There they get complacent and then they fall.

So the Buddha would then talk about the drawbacks of sensuality, what he even called the degradation of sensuality, so that you begin to see that renunciation would be a good thing. You see that renunciation doesn’t mean you renounce all pleasures. It simply means that you try to look for pleasure in a place that’s not involved with sensuality. You give the mind the sense of rapture, the sense of pleasure that comes simply from being secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful thoughts.

Like we’re doing right now with the breath: There’s nothing sensual about the breath. It may feel good physically, but that’s not what the Buddha means by sensuality. Sensuality is your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures: envisioning this, envisioning that, thinking, “I’d like it like this. Well, no, maybe I’d like it like that.” You can run through all kinds of scenarios of possible sensual pleasures.

Here, though, we’re trying to divorce the mind from that sort of fantasizing because we see that it’s going to pull us down at some point. We work on the pleasure of just inhabiting the body from within, what the Buddha calls form: how you feel the body in terms of the energy of the breath, the warmth of the body, the coolness of the liquid parts, the solidity of the solid parts—how you feel it from within, what we call proprioception. Look for your pleasure there, because this kind of pleasure doesn’t corrode the qualities of the mind.

Then, from there, the Buddha would teach the four noble truths. Given your new perspective, you see that it’d be a good thing if the mind could find happiness that doesn’t involve harming anybody at all, a happiness that has no drawbacks. That’s what the four noble truths are about.

One of the big ironies of Buddhism coming to the West is the complaint that the Buddha is so pessimistic, focusing on suffering, suffering, suffering—four whole truths about suffering. Well, they don’t all say just suffering. The third truth is the end of suffering. The fourth is that there are things you can do to put an end to suffering. Otherwise, what is there? We keep coming back to our old pleasures and the sufferings that go with them.

When you see this happening over and over, the things that seem to give meaning to life start getting meaningless. You look after your parents to try to reward them for the goodness they’ve done for you, but then they die, and you die, and you all go your separate ways. You get other parents, and you try to repay them. And then you go your separate ways. This goes on and on and on, repeatedly, without end. You look back. Your parents an eon ago: Where are they now? What does that relationship mean now? Things that seem meaningful close up begin to lose their meaning when viewed from a distance.

Then there’s the repetitiveness of it all, in the sense that you try to establish something, and then it gets worn away. You get it established, and it’s worn away.

You have to think about these things as life gets comfortable, because there’s that tendency, even in stream-enters, to get complacent. They’re pretty secure. They have only seven lifetimes left to live. They’re not going to fall deeper than the human realm. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to suffer between now and the time they reach full awakening.

So, you have to work on your heedfulness. Think about the long-term consequences of what you’re doing. Think of how much work you had to put in to get what you have now. And what are you doing with it? Frittering it away? Have some compassion on the you from the past who worked hard to get the you in the present to this human life. You’ve got the opportunity to practice the Dhamma. The Dhamma is available. The opportunity to practice is here. So, take advantage of it.

As for what it means to finally put an end to suffering, what it would be like to have no more suffering, it’s really going to change your mind. The meaning we have in life is the meaning that “I put in this effort—there was a lot of effort, and a lot of pain, and a lot of whatever involved—but the rewards were worth it.” But what if there were something that, once it was gained, required no further effort, something in which there was no pain involved at all, something that wouldn’t have to be looked after, something that wouldn’t have to be repaired. It just is. Would you need meaning then?

When I was in Europe, I was reading a teaching from a teacher from another tradition, saying that the third noble truth is just your basic awareness: not thinking, not trying to figure things out, just being aware, aware, aware of whatever’s happening. He was saying that the problem with this—what he called the third noble truth—was that it wasn’t very interesting.

That’s a horrible teaching: You’d get to nibbana and you’d be bored? That’s not the case at all.

But what it would actually be like not to have to do things, not to have to suffer: That’s something so out of the range of what we’ve experienced so far that it’s really hard to get our imagination around it.

Which is why the Buddha said it’s not something that you should imagine, it’s something you should realize. Do what’s needed to get there, and then pass judgment. Again, as he said, he’d take you that far, and from that point on you’re free. Nobody ever gets trapped in nibbana, because nibbana is freedom in the most absolute sense.

So, be prepared to have your values change as you follow the path. The practice opens possibilities that otherwise would never have been open to you before. We’re not trying to get back to some earlier innocent state, before social conditioning. As the Buddha said, we’re working to reach what has never been reached before, to attain what has never been attained before, to realize what has never been realized before. It’s going to be something radically different.

And no one who has ever gotten there has ever regretted following the path that took them there. So, allow that possibility to open your mind.

At the same time, have a strong sense of the dangers of not opening your mind that way. That’s why the Buddha said all goodness, all skillfulness, comes from being heedful. It’s not that we’re naturally good. We’re good for a while, and then when circumstances get bad, maybe that goodness can change into something else. You have to see that where you are is very unstable, very precarious, whereas there’s the possibility of absolute stability and safety if you follow the path with a strong sense of dedication, with a strong sense of heedfulness.

So let the path open your heart and mind.