The teachings of the Buddha are summarized in ‘four noble truths’: (i) life means suffering, (ii) the origin of suffering is attachment, (iii) the end of suffering is attainable, and (iv) the path to the end of suffering. The Sanskrit word for ‘suffering’ (dukkha) is a sweeping term that refers to all the physical pains, anxieties, dissatisfactions, frustrations, irritations, and stresses that are part of being human. Dukkha, then, is not something we have; it is something we are. It is a structural or constitutive aspect of the human condition (Loy 1996, 83). The Buddhist tradition generally distinguishes between three different kinds of dukkha. The first refers to all of the inescapable pains of living such as the trauma of birth, illnesses, everyday worries, anxieties of physical diminishment and impending death, and grief from the inevitable loss of loved ones. Existentialists have long described how life is fraught with this kind of meaningless suffering and how the clear-sighted realization of this often brings us face-to-face with the question of God's absence and the ultimate concerns regarding the meaning and purpose of life. Tolstoy, for instance, described how this realization nearly shattered him, pushing him to the edge of suicide:
I could not attribute a reasonable motive to any single act in my whole life. I was only astonished that I could not have realized this at the very beginning. All this had so long ago been known to me! Illness and death would come … to those whom I loved, to myself, and nothing remains but stench and worms. All my acts, whatever I did, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself [would] be nowhere. Why, then, busy oneself with anything. (1994, 16)
The Buddhist tradition goes on to suggest that when we are momentarily free from this first kind of suffering, we are able to examine a deeper and more subtle manifestation of dukkha, the suffering caused by the ceaseless change and impermanence of all things.
In this second state, we suffer in the way we cling to the things we desire but that are invariably fleeting and transitory. In an effort to deny or flee from the impermanence of things and from our own impermanence, we attach ourselves to our possessions, our physical health, our relationships, our professional accomplishments and social identities because they create the illusion that we are real and that there is something secure and thing-like about our existence. But Buddhism shows that clinging to attachments in this way is ultimately self-defeating. Each time we attain the thing we crave, a feeling of emptiness invariably follows it, and this creates a new craving. The result is an endless cycle of craving, revealing that we are never happy or content with where we are — right now — in our lives. Happiness is always around the next corner; it will come after the promotion at work, after the wedding, after the children are born, after retirement, etc. This insight teaches us the second of Buddhism's four noble truths, namely, that the origin or cause of our suffering is in our ceaseless craving for attachments. Stuck in this cycle, we are always diverted and distracted from the present moment by desiring the next thing. But filling ourselves with things cannot fill the void because the human situation is itself a void; it is no-thing. A number of existentialists have pointed out how this manifestation of suffering is exacerbated today because modern technology has created increasingly sophisticated ways to manufacture distractions and rapidly satisfy new cravings. Indeed, Heidegger will refer to this state of restless distraction as one of signature ‘symptoms’ of modernity, where we are “unable-to-bear the stillness” of our own lives and are always caught up in the “mania for what is surprising, for what immediately sweeps [us] away and impresses [us], again and again and in different ways” (1999b, 84).
This second kind of suffering is similar to what existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir have called ‘bad faith’ insofar as it is a way of being that desires the thing-like security of ‘being-in-itself’ and flees from the structural contingency and impermanence of consciousness or ‘being-for-itself.’ By asserting ‘existence precedes essence,’ existentialists remind us that there is no pre-given essence that makes us who we are. Our identities, rather, are fundamentally transient and unstable; as long as we exist we are a ‘not yet,’ always in the process of becoming, of ceaselessly making and re-making ourselves. This is why Sartre says, ‘I am what I am not.’ But like the Buddhist, existentialists are also sensitive to the psychological need we have to deny our impermanence because denial protects us from the painful truth of our situation. Nietzsche, for instance, describes how we let ourselves be deceived so that we never have to confront the fact that there is no stable ground or foundation that can secure our existence. He refers to this historical mass deception in the West as the ‘will to truth.’ From Greek philosophy to Christendom, a story has been told regarding the truth about the way the world really is. It is, according to Nietzsche, our “longest lie” (1995, 344), and we cling to it because it tells us there is something real and enduring about us, that we have a ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘will’ that is not subject to the terrible vicissitudes of life. But the acculturated habit of clinging to the idea of the self in this way leads to the third and deepest form of dukkha.
In the Buddhist tradition, the consuming effort to secure our sense of self and cover over our own impermanence results in ‘conditioned states’ where self-centered craving becomes automatic and unconscious. Life simply becomes the ceaseless struggle against our own impermanence, where we endlessly try to order and arrange our lives in an effort to feel grounded and secure. This is an all-encompassing form of suffering because it permeates every aspect of our lives. But it is also the subtlest and most inconspicuous form of suffering because the patterns of socialization that constitute these conditioned states prevent us from realizing that we are suffering. In this sense, “Everyone collaborates in everyone else's forgetting” (Batchelor 1997, 22). The worst kind of suffering, then, is when we forget that we are suffering. Our lives are lived on autopilot, reflexively conditioned around our attachments to money, work, possessions, family, and friends, all in an unconscious effort to make ourselves real. But this conditioned way of living is ultimately futile. As the existentialists make clear, no matter how culturally entrenched and tightly wound the illusion of the enduring self becomes, we are always vulnerable to penetrating emotional experiences or ‘limit situations’ that have the power to jolt us out of this state, shattering the armor of the self and leaving us naked and exposed to life's overwhelming transience.
But this leads us to the third noble truth of Buddhism, the truth that there is an end to suffering. If the source of our suffering is rooted in the self's ceaseless desire to be permanent and real, then the end of suffering has something to do with dismantling our understanding of selfhood altogether. Buddhism does this with the idea of ‘dependent origination’ (pratītya-samutpāda), suggesting that all things, including the self, arise or come into being in mutual interdependence with all other things. On this view, there is no such thing as an independent, self-subsisting entity. Everything is in a state of dynamic interplay or ‘co-arising’ with everything else. It is a mistake, then, to talk in the way we usually do about principles of causality, of X causing Y, because this creates the impression that X and Y are separate entities. Dependent origination reveals that there are no subjects or objects, that things are always interdependent and in a state of mutual inter-causality (Loy 1996, 88–90). The Western idea of the self as an autonomous and stable consciousness or ego creates the impression that we are somehow separate and distinct from this transient, interrelational flux, and we spend our lives clinging to this illusion. But clinging to the self in this way is itself the source of our suffering. The end of suffering, then, involves letting-go of the illusion of the self, of undoing this conditioned state and realizing that we are ‘no-self’ (anatman). It is only then that we can be freed from the compulsive cycle of attachment and craving and begin to accept the poignant transiency of things in the present moment.