“Praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disrepute, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.”
~ Buddha
As you might recall, our cat Gabby was quite sick a while back. She’s doing much better, still a bit thin, but back to her normal rambunctious, lizard stalking, princess self. Her one paw finally festered to reveal the cat bite, which the vet was fairly certain was the cause of her illness. New neighbors moved in a while back, with two cats. One they lost immediately. They then proceeded to get two new kittens, which resulted in their second cat abandoning ship. And stalking the neighborhood. He’s a beautiful cat, you can tell, wanting only to find a loving new home for himself. So he’s fighting with Gabby. Gabby wants nothing to do with him in her territory. Her house, her people, her food.
So last night at 2:30, a cat fight ensued. Spencer jumped immediately out of bed, and was gone for an hour+, in search of the cat to prove to the neighbor that it is theirs (they’ve been doubting it). I could feel his tension course through my body. And as I lay there, in half sleep, I could hear my mind, churning out all kinds of negative talk. Every bit of the eight worldly conditions spoken to in Buddha’s quote above. I was blaming, thinking ill will of my neighbor, pissed that Spencer wasn’t back home so I could get back to sleep, worry about Gabby … (on and on)
The First Noble Truth … Dukkha. Suffering. Plain and Simple. But just as he says in one of his most famous of quotes “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.” Laying there in the dark stillness, I could clearly see this. I was creating my own dissatisfaction. I breathed, and I let it go.
Dukkha can also be categorized into eight types belonging to the three categories …
Inherited suffering:
- Birth (jāti): the discomfort of birth and experiencing the world for the first time; and the discomfort of relating to new demands or experiences.
- Old age (jarā): the discomfort involved in the process of aging and growing old; this can apply to psychological as well as physical discomfort of aging.
- Sickness (byādhi): the discomfort of physical or psychological illness.
- Death (maraṇa): includes the pain of separation and not being able to continue on in your endeavors, as well as the physical discomfort of dying.
Suffering between the periods of birth and death:
- Getting what you don’t want: being unable to avoid difficult or painful situations.
- Not being able to hold onto what is desirable: the pain of trying to hold onto what is desirable, lovely, splendid, terrific.
- Not getting what you do want: this underlies the previous two categories; the anxiety of not getting what you want.
General misery:
- All-pervasive suffering: a very subtle dissatisfaction that exists all the time; it arises as a reaction to the qualities of conditioned things (e.g. the impermanence of things).
As we begin to contemplate that this is true, and we use mindfulness to see it arising, we become grateful that Buddha promises there is an end. Because life would really suck if once we came to this realization, that is all there is … suffering …
“All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?”
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows … The well instructed, however he feels only one pain: physical, but not mental. As he is touched by that painful feeling, he is not resistant. He discerns, as it actually is present, the origination, passing away, allure, drawback, and escape from that feeling.”
There is a story told by an old monk … “If I have a pebble in my sandal, I remove it. But I do so without becoming frustrated at the pebble itself or angry at the person who forgot to rake the ground.”
The Buddha said:
“Conquer anger by non-anger. Conquer evil by good. Conquer miserliness by liberality. Conquer a liar by truthfulness.”
(Dhammapada, v. 233).
Barbara O’Brien notes: Working with ourselves and others and our lives in this way is Buddhism. Buddhism is not a belief system, or a ritual, or some label to put on your T-shirt. It’s this.
And so we practice. Let’s all try to be mindful this week, and not get caught in the trap of praise and blame.
