moralobjectivity.net: copyright Robert M. Ellis 2008
This book is also available as a paperback or pdf download from Lulu.com
Many accounts of Buddhism start with the three lakshanas, or three marks (or characteristics) of conditioned existence: dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence) and anatta (insubstantiality). These are said to give a basic Buddhist analysis of the nature of phenomenal existence, and together form the First Noble Truth, at the root of Buddhist teaching[1]. They are also a good place to start in distinguishing the core principles of Buddhism.
Dukkha
The first mark of conditioned existence is dukkha. This has long been mistranslated as “suffering”, even by Buddhists themselves, but it refers not just to the experience of pain or suffering as such, but also to the experience of loss or mortification when we do not experience an expected pleasure, and to a more general sense of meaninglessness (sankhara-dukkha). What these doctrines have in common is the idea of unsatisfactoriness, i.e. the idea that our experience does not give us ultimate satisfaction, however promising it may appear.
Dukkha is a feature of conditioned existence or samsara, which means that what is being claimed is not that the universe itself is dukkha, just that the phenomenal universe (the universe we experience) is dukkha. But does this claim ring true? The whole of what I experience will only be unsatisfactory if I compare it to a standard of satisfaction that it fails to live up to, and clearly sometimes this happens. For example, I want this book to be accepted by a publisher, and I shall be disappointed and feel it to be unsatisfactory or frustrating if every publisher rejects it; but the reason for this is because I have a desire for the book to be published, a model in my mind of what will happen which may be disappointed. If I lacked this desire, however, I would feel no frustration, and would not experience the world as frustrating.
In order to maintain the belief that all phenomenal existence is dukkha, Buddhists must insist that I can never experience anything without this anticipation of satisfaction that is then not satisfied; or that if I do have such experiences of being free from dukkha, then I must be enlightened. But how do they know this? How do they know that everyone’s experience is always unsatisfactory? How do they even know that their own experience is always unsatisfactory?
To test any claim we need to look at possible counter-examples. In this case, I try to imagine the most satisfying experience of my life to see whether I can make sense of the belief that it is ultimately unsatisfactory. What springs to mind are, for example, meditational experiences, experiences of achievement on completing a project, or experiences of sexual or sensual satisfaction. When I experienced all of these, was I somehow comparing them to a divine template, in comparison with which these “satisfying” experiences were unsatisfactory? I think not.
To insist that all these “satisfying” experiences must have been ultimately “unsatisfactory” not only requires skating over the experience itself and imposing a dogmatic framework on it, but it also means assuming that we will never have a fully satisfying experience in the future, short of enlightenment. As soon as we cease to trust our own experience of satisfaction at the point we have that experience, dogma rears its head, because no matter what our experience might be, it will make no difference to the belief that it is unsatisfactory. We will then have no other standard by which to judge than the wholesale acceptance of the dogma that all experience is unsatisfactory. The doctrine of dukkha requires that everyone always has a perfect measure in mind beside which the world seems imperfect. Buddhists have no way of knowing that this is the case, and thus must dogmatically assert it. But they do not need to do so.
The useful insight to be found in the doctrine of dukkha has nothing to do with a claim about the phenomenal universe, let alone the actual universe. It is simply a claim that if we hold up a standard of perfect satisfaction as a basis of judging our experience (as we often, in fact, seem to do), we find that experience wanting. This means that if we want to stop experiencing dukkha, we should stop using this perfect measure. The principle is one about how we should see things, not how things are.
This point may be seen more clearly if we tried turning around the doctrine of dukkha and made it into a doctrine of sukha, or happiness. Supposing we claimed that everything in the phenomenal universe, all our experiences, was in fact happy. They might seem unhappy sometimes, but this is just because we are not using the right measure to judge what we experience. If we used the correct standard of imperfection, indeed of general grottiness in the universe, we would see that what we actually experience is always better than this. Since this is the true standard to judge by, it might be claimed, in fact the universe is much better than our expectations.
This doctrine of sukha is neither more nor less implausible than the doctrine of dukkha, Like dukkha, it says that if we apply a certain type of standard to our experience, that experience will be found wanting. What it doesn’t do is show that we in fact always apply that standard, or even that we ought to. In practice, because our cravings often lead us to get attached to an idealisation of how things are going to be, dukkha is probably much more common than sukha, and that is why the doctrine of dukkha offers a useful insight for many people: but it does not give a universal law any more than sukha does.
Superficial critics of Buddhism often take the doctrine of dukkha to indicate pessimism, and Buddhists hasten to defend themselves against this charge by explaining that dukkha has a positive purpose. It does indeed have a positive purpose. If you don’t identify a problem and acknowledge its existence, you cannot fix it, and dukkha provides a foundation for the positive progress offered in the other Noble Truths. However, this positive purpose is not furthered by taking dukkha to be a truth about the phenomenal universe. It would be better served by giving dukkha as a practical principle about how we should respond to the suffering we experience, pointing out the drawbacks of allowing craving to determine our way of seeing it.
So the first element of the “First Noble Truth” is not a truth at all. It does point to a useful insight, but one that has been misleadingly presented through the ages. Newcomers to Buddhism have to struggle to beat their way through the obfuscation of its traditional presentation in order to get to the useful teaching, and things are made unnecessarily difficult for them from the very beginning. It appears that Buddhism wants to deny, or at least underemphasise, the degree of positive fulfilment we do actually get from our imperfect existence, but it does not need to do this to make the underlying point. How many newcomers have been needlessly put off by this presentation of the “truth” at the beginning? Why does Buddhism continue to present itself in this misleading way? This is a question I will have many occasions to repeat in this book.
Anicca
Let us now look, a little more briefly, at the other two marks of conditioned existence. Anicca, the doctrine of impermanence, is again often expressed in the form that all conditioned things are impermanent. We suffer, in part, because we take what is actually impermanent to be permanent, not recognising its true nature.
Once again, though, when this is offered as a truth about conditioned existence we find that whether it is true depends on your standpoint. When we stand looking at a river, are we seeing continual change because the waters flow by, or an absence of change because the river is still there? Any experience over a given period of time will reveal some features that appear to change during that time and others which remain the same. Why should we focus on one of these features and not the other? To say that we should focus on change, not permanence, because the world is really changing rather than really permanent, is just dogmatic. My experience itself is not necessarily one of impermanence unless I judge it lacking by the measure of an absolute permanence, but there is no way of proving that this is always the measure I really apply, or really ought to apply, when there are other possible ways of seeing it.
For example, let’s take the case of bereavement. This is the classic case of impermanence often mentioned by Buddhists. It is claimed that we assume people to be permanent: then, when they are taken away from us by death, we suffer because we are not adapted to the impermanence of the universe. No doubt this is sometimes, or even often, the case. But to say that it is always the case is over-statement. Bereavement is not always a question of being surprised by impermanence. For example, in the case of my mother, who died recently from Alzheimer’s, I did not personally find it so. With an Alzheimer’s patient, one is more likely to take comfort from the fact that the semi-human state reached by an old person is impermanent, and greet their death as a relief.
In practice, though, what actually proves insightful about the doctrine of impermanence is that quite often people do seem to have an assumption of something being permanent when it is not. For example, people are disappointed when childhood haunts have changed, or fail to take into account the effect of ageing on their marriage. Once more, the doctrine is much more useful, and accurate, when not taken as an insight into how things actually are, but rather as practical guidance into how we ought to avoid seeing them in certain common circumstances. Buddhists, though, are their own worst enemies in presenting a confusing version of their doctrine that claims much more than it practically needs to. It is not the case that all conditioned existence is impermanent, only that we may suffer if we are attached to a permanent idea of something that is impermanent.
As with the doctrine of dukkha, one could also just as easily turn this around the other way. What if, instead of a doctrine of impermanence, we had a doctrine of permanence? We think things are constantly changing, and we suffer when they don’t but actually stay the same. For example, this would fit the experience of frustration of those trying to make progressive reforms in an atmosphere of stifling conservative bureaucracy. The doctrine of permanence, again, would not be essentially more or less true than the doctrine of impermanence. Again, it would be true to some experience, but misleading when dogmatically applied as a metaphysical claim about all experience.
Anatta
Finally, there is anatta, often poorly translated as “not-self”, but better rendered as “insubstantiality”, or even “lack of ultimate substantiality”. Anatta basically points out that when we believe there is a definite object, or a definite self, corresponding to a certain label, then we are mistaken. For example, the “chair” I believe I am sitting on is just a convenient way of referring to a set of processes and experiences, but it is my mind that has imposed on it the idea of a “chair” as a defined unchanging object with clear boundaries. Similarly with myself, I tend to believe that there is a fixed thing I call me, when what I actually experience is a set of changing mental and physical states to which I attach that label. Such labels are part of the process of attachment, as I can only be attached to (or reject) something I have thus conceptually parcelled up.
There are strong philosophical arguments that support this basic insight in the Buddhist tradition. The labelling of either an object or a self will vary in different circumstances, given different cultures, languages, and individual experiences. For example, a person from a culture that had never encountered Western technology would not see a computer as an identifiable object as we would. A piece of polystyrene could be a toy for a child, non-biodegradable rubbish for another person, packaging for a warehouse-man, or potential modelling material for someone else. These variations suggest that it is not the object itself, but our way of labelling it, which gives it its identity. Similarly with the boundaries of an object: do I see a car as a set of parts, as an individual object, or part of the traffic? Do I consider my hair and toenails part of me? The boundaries are set by us. When objects or selves start and stop in time also depends on us: when does a foetus become a person? When does grass in the stomach of a rabbit cease to become grass and start to become rabbit?
However, these arguments only support the insight that the labelling of objects comes from our minds, not that there are ultimately no objects. We simply do not know whether there are objects in the world out there, because we only ever perceive them through the filter of our experiences. It makes sense, in some ways, to believe that there are trees and rabbits and boxes and computers, and indeed people. However, if they exist, these things are constantly changing, the labels placed on them may vary, and their boundaries are shifting. Buddhists tend to explain this in terms of objects existing conventionally but not ultimately[2]. Anatta, then, claims that objects do not ultimately exist, at least in the forms we experience and label them. More philosophically careful Buddhists may also add that anatta means objects do not not exist: that is, we do not know ultimately that they do not exist any more than we know that they do exist. All we know is that our conceptions of them are likely to be limited and mistaken.
Once again, then, we have what first appeared to be a metaphysical claim, about objects existing or not existing, but on closer examination the doctrine of anatta (unless crudely expressed or misinterpreted) makes no such claims. It only requires us to bear in mind the limitations of our knowledge. It is intended to leave us in a state of open-minded doubt about objects around us, not a dogmatic assumption that they do not exist. This doctrine becomes of great practical value when it reminds one to reconsider the conceptions that have become the focus of a strong emotional response, such as hatred. I may be carrying round and constantly reviewing a mental image of the person I hate as having a certain character that led them to do or say certain things against me. However, a re-examination of this idea in the light of anatta might lead me to reflect that they also probably have many other more positive characteristics unknown to me, and it is an idea that I hate rather than a person.
If we separate it from a metaphysical claim, anatta becomes inseparable from the
Where anatta can be interpreted unhelpfully is where it is seen just as an insight of the state of enlightenment, which is then at such a distance from our experience that we fall back on purely conventional categories. If anatta makes no difference to our lives now, we are not taking its insights seriously enough. If we use it as a reminder of the limitations of our understanding of reality, we can use it to reflect on anything in our experience, and make gradual adjustments so as to make our understanding of that thing better by questioning what we have previously assumed about it.
There is a strong tendency in the Buddhist tradition, however, not to use anatta to question common assumptions at all, but rather just as a way of idealising enlightened experience, which allegedly sees things as they really are beyond concepts. We may reflect that we do not understand things as they really are, but, instead of then investigating them for ourselves, then take this as a reason for depending on an enlightened person’s account of them. This approach can often have the effect just of reinforcing a new conventional view, which has grown up around a tradition of what may once have been one (allegedly enlightened) person’s insight. Rather than being a tool to gradually rid us of illusions, anatta then shuts us into them more firmly. This, of course, raises many questions about enlightenment and authority in Buddhism, which we will return to later (in the next chapter).
The three lakshanas in general
For dukkha, anicca, and anatta, then, we have found a common pattern. All are based on insights that can be of practical value. However, all three doctrines are commonly presented as metaphysical beliefs, rather than as principles of judgement in relation to our own experience. The presentation of the three lakshanas as metaphysical beliefs is responsible for a great deal of misunderstanding of Buddhism by both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Those who see Buddhism as a negative and pessimistic religion are not always wrong, as pessimism is a type of dogmatism (insisting inflexibly that things are always worse than experience gives us grounds to believe), and such dogmatism is often encouraged by the way Buddhists present these doctrines. On the other hand, the need to avoid denying the hollowness or lack of satisfaction we often experience, the need to appreciate the impermanence of things we are attached to, and the need to appreciate the way in which we impose categories on our experience are all vital starting points for the spiritual life.
[1] For example, see Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Wisdom 1990), or Sangharakshita A Guide to the Buddhist Path (Windhorse 1990) p.177
[2] As in the “two truths” philosophy of Nagarjuna (e.g. for an introduction see Paul Williams Mahayana Buddhism [Routledge 1989] p.69)
continue to part c: Greed and hatred