The Buddha’s Good News

We sometimes hear the Buddha being criticized as being pessimistic. After all, the four noble truths focus on suffering. You look at his worldview, and there are a lot of hells. The possibility of falling to the realm of the animals, hungry ghosts, is a possibility.

But then you look at the people who listened to the Buddha’s teachings when he was alive. They found those teachings to be good news.

The good news is that there are things you can do to avoid suffering. After all, the four noble truths don’t just stop with the first noble truth. There are four of them. They explain the cause of suffering. They say that it is possible to put an end to suffering, and they lay out the path.

And the path to the end of suffering doesn’t lead just to a gray, oatmeal sort of destination. It is the ultimate happiness, total happiness. A state of consciousness that’s true, blissful, and free: the most excellent thing there is.

Think about how the Buddha arranged his teachings. When you look at yourself, you can see that you’re torn between many different desires. There’s the desire to practice, the desire not to practice, the desire for immediate gratification, the desire for long-term happiness.

There are lots of different ways that you could sort through those desires. A very common one, especially in modern psychology, is to say that you have to put up with the fact that there’s always going to be conflict inside. You have your ideas as to what you should do if you want to be respected by other people. But then there are things you want to do that may not be so worthy of respect. There’s going to be a constant battle between these desires that’s never really resolved.

That’s one approach to your problem. You have to get over your neuroses and then put up with the ordinary miseries of being a conflicted human being. That’s a pretty depressing approach. That’s pessimistic.

Then there’re people who notice that for every desire, you have a different sense of who you are. So, the solution, they say, must be to figure out who you are, really, beneath all those different senses of self, and then from there, decide what you should be desiring.

But how much agreement do you find in the world’s ideas about who you are? Are you the product of a creator god? Are you the result of different social forces? As the Buddha pointed out, if you try to define yourself, you limit yourself. If you say you’re just an animal being, a conditioned being that happens to have some consciousness, what can that kind of being know? What kind of happiness can that being find? Not much.

As a Buddhist scholar said to me one time, “After all, we’re conditioned beings, so how can we know anything unconditioned?”

That’s starting from the definition of who you are, what you are, and then figuring out what you can know, what you should try to desire, based on that definition. It’s all pretty limited. And limiting.

Then there’re people who say, “The Buddha taught that there’s nobody there anyhow, so you’re a nothing.” That’s even worse. What can a nothing do?

But that wasn’t the Buddha’s approach at all. Instead of starting with where you are, he started with where you should go: what would be the best thing to desire. Total happiness. Secure. Unchanging. Harmless.

The next step to figure out was: Does such a happiness exist? And is there a way to go there? He decided to try to answer those questions. Whatever sense he might have had of himself prior to setting his sights on that goal, he learned that he had to sort that out to fit in with that goal: to deal with all his different selves inside. He had to decide which ones to keep as part of the path, and which ones to put away.

He tried out different paths to that goal and he came up with different answers, but he finally found a path that worked. And the answer it gave was Yes, there is such a happiness, and it can be found through your own efforts.

And starting from his overarching desire, his determination, to find the ultimate truth, the ultimate happiness, and finally finding it, he came up with new ideas of what kind of self would be useful along that path—in a provisional way.

The sense that you are competent to do this is really important. You see this in many of his teachings. There are a lot of people in his time who felt that they were totally incapable.

There’s a story of an outcaste who, the Buddha saw, had potential. The outcaste is walking along the street and he sees the Buddha coming to him. So he tries to get out of the way. The Buddha gets closer and closer, and the outcaste pushes himself more and more into the wall to make himself as small as possible. This gives you an idea of how miserable the life of an outcaste was in those days. Then he finally realizes the Buddha wants to talk to him. The Buddha teaches him, and he becomes a noble disciple. The Buddha looked for every opportunity to encourage people.

So, yes, you can do this. As he said, if it were impossible to abandon unskillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught it. If it were impossible to develop skillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught that. But it’s because it’s possible, and because it’s for your good, that’s why he taught these things.

His concern as a teacher always was to give people the confidence that they can do this. As he said, when you listen to a Dhamma talk, be careful that you don’t despise the speaker, you don’t despise the Dhamma, and you don’t despise yourself. If you despise yourself, you just let the talk go past. You say, “Well, this is not for me. It’s for somebody else.” But it must apply to you in some way, so listen to it carefully.

Think about the people the Buddha taught.

Once he taught hired killers: the person who’d been hired to kill him, and then those who had been hired to kill the person who’d killed him, and then the people who’d been hired to kill those people. He was able to teach them to gain the Dhamma eye.

He taught Angulimala, the bandit who had killed lots of people, to the point where the king was afraid of him.

If those people could be taught, then you can be taught.

That’s an important part of the self that you’re going to need to practice: the sense that you’re competent to do this, and that you’ll enjoy the results. As the Buddha said, if you think there’s any trace of suffering or disappointment at all in nibbana, that’s wrong view. That’s his guarantee that this is going to be really good.

Think of the deal he portrayed. If there were a deal that someone would spear you with 300 spears every day—100 spears in the morning, 100 spears at noon, 100 spears in the evening—for 100 years, and then to be guaranteed stream entry at the end, he said it’d be a good deal. It’d be worth your while to take it up. And when stream entry came, you wouldn’t believe that you had gained it through pain. The experience would obliterate all sense of the pain you’d gone through. So yes, you will enjoy this.

And finally, you have to have the sense that you’re able to learn from your own actions, because this is going to be a self-training. The Buddha gives you instructions, but often those instructions are like riddles. Breathe in and out aware of the whole body: How do you do that? How do you relate to your whole body? Most of us focus on one part of the body at a time. It takes training to be aware of the whole body all at once, and to allow a sense of ease to spread through the whole body.

He gives you ideas of what’s possible, but it’s going to be up to you to figure out how you do those things.

But he gives you also the example that he’s been able to do it himself and he’s taught other people to do it. So, you can use your ingenuity and figure out for yourself that there must be some way of doing this.

It’s like reverse engineering a contraption you get. You ask yourself, “Well, how did they make this?” Then you take it apart. And just the realization that somebody has done this should give you the confidence, “Yes, I can do this, too.”

After all, that’s what the Buddha wants you to do: not just accept what he taught, but also to develop your own sensitivity. Sensitivity to what you’re doing. Sensitivity to the results. Being sensitive to any disturbance, any stress, any suffering that would come in the results.

That’s how he himself was able to get beyond, say, the first jhana, and go into the higher levels of concentration, and then to get beyond the levels of concentration itself, through developing his own sensitivities.

So, you might say that the training is a sensitivity training. But it’s not about being sensitive to what you just happen to feel or what your emotions tell you.

You’re learning to be sensitive to what you’re doing and the connection between what you’re doing and the level of ease or pain, suffering or pleasure that you may feel as a result of what you’re doing. From there you learn how to manipulate the connections till you get something good. That’s the kind of sensitivity you’re trying to develop.

So, for the sake of the path, for the sake of the goal, these are the different selves that you take on. You may say, “Oh, but I have some other selves that I’m really protective of: the ones that want to be lazy, the ones that don’t want to do any work.”

But why do you want to be protective of those? What have they given you? Learn how to identify the potentials for strong, confident selves inside. They’re there. Give them some air. Give them some opportunity to show themselves.

This is what’s special about the Buddha’s approach. Instead of trying to find out who your unitary self is and then, from there, deciding how you should unify your desires, he basically says, “What could be the most outstanding thing to desire? What could be the best possible thing to desire?” Then use your various ways of constructing a sense of self to help bring that desire about, help to attain the goal.

The Buddha wasn’t the sort of person who started with first principles. He started with a goal: where he wants to take you. Everything in his teachings makes sense in relationship to that goal. And it’s a goal you can attain.

That’s the good news. This is why the teaching is not pessimistic at all, and why the people in the time of the Buddha saw it as good news as well.