The World as Emptiness, Part 3: The Cause of Suffering

The next thing that comes up—the second of the noble truths—is about the cause of suffering, and this, in Sanskrit, is called tṛṣṇā. Tṛṣṇā is related to our word ‘thirst.’ It’s very often translated ‘desire;’ that will do. Better, perhaps, is ‘craving,’ ‘clinging,’ ‘grasping,’ or even, to use our modern psychological word, ‘blocking.’ When, for example, somebody is blocked, and dithers and hesitates, and doesn’t know what to do, he is in the strictest Buddhist sense attached; he’s stuck. But a buddha can’t be stuck. He cannot be phased. He always flows, just as water always flows, even if you dam it; the river just keeps on getting higher and higher and higher, until it flows over the dam. It’s unstoppable.

Now, Buddha said, then, dukkha comes from tṛṣṇā. You all suffer because you cling to the world, and you don’t recognize that the world is anitya and anātman. So then, try, if you can, not to grasp. Well, do you see that that immediately poses a problem? Because the student who has started off this dialogue with the buddha then makes various efforts to give up desire. Upon which he very rapidly discovers that he is desiring not to desire, and he takes that back to the teacher, who says, “Well, well, well.” He said, “Of course. You are desiring not to desire, and that’s, of course, excessive. All I want you to do is to give up desiring as much as you can. Don’t want to go beyond the point of which you’re capable.” And for this reason, Buddhism is called the Middle Way. Not only is it the middle way between the extremes of ascetic discipline and pleasure-seeking, but it’s also the middle way in a very subtle sense. Yes, don’t desire to give up more desire than you can. And if you find that a problem, don’t desire to be successful in giving up more desire than you can. You see what’s happening? At every time he’s returned to the middle way; he’s moved out of an extreme situation.

Now then, we’ll go on. We’ll cut out what happens in the pursuit of that method until a little later. The next truth in the list is concerned with the nature of release from dukkha. And so number three is nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is the goal of Buddhism; it’s the state of liberation corresponding to what the Hindus call mokṣa. The word means ‘blow out,’ and it comes from the root nivṛtti. Now, some people think that what it means is ‘blowing out the flame of desire.’ I don’t believe this. I believe that it means ‘breathe out,’ rather than ‘blow out,’ because if you try to hold your breath—and in Indian thought prāṇa, breath, is the life principle—if you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold on to your breath. And so, in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to life. What the devil is the point of surviving—going on living—when it’s a drag?

But you see, that’s what people do. They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs, and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You’ve gotta get out and mow the damn thing all the time. And you buy expensive this-that, and soon you’re all involved in mortgages, and instead of being able to walk out in the garden and enjoy it, you sit at your desk looking at all the books and filling out this, that, and the other, and paying bills, and answering letters. What a lot of rot! But, you see, that is holding on to life. So, translated into colloquial American, nirvāṇa is ‘whew!’ Because if you let your breath go, it’ll come back. So nirvāṇa is not annihilation. It’s not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void. Nirvāṇa is the state of being let go. It is a state of consciousness, and a state of—you might call it—being, here and now in this life.