Ouch! Systemic Suffering and the Fourth Noble Truth

b0716430-87db-4a38-bfbd-63a0cff0cfc7-1020x679[divide]Perhaps it is this focus on mindfulness or meditation, and nothing else on the Eightfold Path, that leads many to misconstrue the path as a personal journey and not a collective path of interrelating, or a collective way toward the cessation of suffering. We emphasize mindfulness and meditation so much that perhaps our wheel of dharma has gone flat. Or perhaps we have rode upon this wheel with such a singular approach like, "I meditate," that we lack the full understanding that we need others and other aspects of the path to turn the wheel of dharma.[divide]As I write, I am thinking back on being in the hospital emergency room two nights ago. There was so much pain I literally moaned for hours until the doctor administered morphine. The medicine ceased the pain, but the systemic hypertension of life at the root of the pain could not be alleviated with morphine.When I entered the path of Buddha's teachings there was the great human experience of heartache from the experience of being discriminated against most of my life. I could seek spiritual or other professional guidance around my personal heartache. However, I felt the healing could not be complete without a collective attention to systemic suffering that is at the root of that heartache. This notion of healing brings me to the Fourth Noble Truth which is: there is a way leading to the cessation of suffering. That way is called the Eightfold Path.Many see this path as a personal improvement or as an achievement ladder in becoming (and appearing) Buddhist. However, among all the Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path in particular cannot be practiced out of relationship with others. It cannot be practiced without understanding suffering as systemic and as a collective human experience. Therefore, it cannot be practiced without attending to the suffering of classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.Before describing the path and its collective nature, I want to tell you a little about my first night on a vision quest I did many years ago. A vision quest is a spiritual journey one takes alone in the wilderness. In the journey you are to see something of yourself, others, or witness life. Usually, you are assisted in setting up camp and then left to your own journey without food and sometimes without water for a number of days. The leader(s) of the journey stay at home base and check on you from time to time. My journey was to last three nights. On the first night, the darkness seemed to push against my face. I couldn't feel a distinction between the darkness and me. Fortunately, the moonlight made its way over the tops of the redwood trees. There was just enough light and stillness for me to contemplate the question, “Exactly, when did I become so fearful of the dark?”As I closed my eyes and began to sleep I had a memory of darkness as an experience in the womb. I drifted to sleep smiling with that memory. The quest re-introduced to me darkness as a condition prior to giving birth. So, I knew the darkness which surrounded me in the forest. I had known it even before coming here.In the same way the vision quest in the dark was to see, I sit zazen, or practice sitting meditation as a follower of Buddha’s teachings, to see into the dark — the unknown, mysterious places of life.As I sit in meditation, plant my feet, I witness life.An innate sense recovers a memory of being connected to nature and all living beings. We see what we know — that as human beings we know how to live in harmony with all living beings; to connect to an ancient way of living as family, as community. We have only forgotten. And the Eightfold Path is one reminder among many other wisdom teachings.This ancient path espoused by Shakyamuni Buddha is a path in which we awaken to life as we are living it; we awaken to life's suffering by listening to, hearing, the cries of the Earth.It is not a path that we achieve and boast about with our friends, but rather an inexhaustible commitment to embrace the possibility of ending suffering.It is a path so expansive that it includes not only our own suffering but also that of others.And yet the Eightfold Path was taught not only as the path to end suffering, but also the path of awakening or liberation.Commonly, the Eightfold Path is described as

  • Right view
  • Right intention
  • Right speech
  • Right action
  • Right livelihood
  • Right effort
  • Right mindfulness, and
  • Right concentration/meditation.

The word “right” has been used as a translation of the Pali word samma that appears in Buddha’s original sermon. Samma has also been translated to mean perfect or complete. However, it literally stands for the quietude of citta or mind upon itself. The entire path is samma, every aspect of the path has samma, and one’s whole life is samma. The complete or perfect knowing of the whole series of each moment of our lives is samma. Therefore, for the sake of avoiding a sense of right and wrong, or confusing this path with the ten commandments in the Bible, I prefer to use the word “complete” in the place of "right." Each are aspects of samma or complete and perfect life. I invite you to see this path as a circle with eight spokes:Prajna (Wisdom)1. Sammadicci, (Pali) "Complete View," or "Shoken" (Japanese).2. Sammasamcappa, "Complete Thought," or "Shoshi."Sila ( Morality)3. Sammavacha, "Complete Speech," or "Shoku."4. Sammacamanta, "Complete Activity," or "Shogu."5. Samma-ajiva, "Complete Livelihood," or "Shomyo."Samadhi ( Insight and meditation)6. Sammavayama, "Complete Effort," or "Shonin."7. Sammasati "Complete Mindfulness," or "Sho-shojin."8. Sammasamadhi, "Complete Practice (concentration/meditation)," or "Shojo."You may notice there are three areas of this path: Prajna (wisdom), Sila (action), and Samadhi (Insight/awareness/meditation). You also may notice most of us practice heavily at one spoke of this wheel — usually mindfulness and meditation. Perhaps it is this focus on mindfulness or meditation, and nothing else on the Eightfold Path, that leads many to misconstrue the path as a personal journey, and not a collective path of interrelating or a collective way toward the cessation of suffering. We emphasize mindfulness and meditation so much that perhaps our wheel of dharma has gone flat. Or perhaps we have rode upon this wheel with such a singular approach like, "I meditate," that we lack the full understanding that we need others and other aspects of the path to turn the wheel of dharma.We cannot practice complete or right speech, view, and livelihood alone. Therefore, the Fourth Noble Truth is an invitation to consider perfect and complete interrelationship as crucial in the cessation of suffering.

  • What would it look like to bring our collective struggles before our personal ones to the path of spiritual awakening?
  • What does it mean to have complete view, intention/thought, or activity in relationship to systemic suffering of racism, sexism, classism, that we experience collectively?
  • Can we surface wisdom from our own bones regarding hatred between us?

Walking the Eightfold Path is to break the surface of things, things like distortions about who we are. It is to break through what obstructs our liberation. We are constantly yearning for peace and harmony. Yet, the transformation requires us to destroy a life system that we depend upon — a system that is artificially bound together by the dominance of one living being upon another.Unfortunately, the Eightfold Path is not a simple answer. It cannot be taught because it is wisdom that must surface from within your own life. You must see it and feel it. Dharma is dead on the written page. You can only bring it alive with the actions of your life. You cannot just memorize it and expect it to show up in your life. The path can only be engaged in your living it. It can only be engaged as an awakening. We might say, “I don’t want to do this until I know what it is.” Some might say, “Prove that this will work when all else has failed us.” We are stymied by our instinct to doubt the path's legitimacy. For these reason there exist practices such as meditation retreats and sacred time like vision quests to help pry open the closed doors of our lives.Our hearts can bring us into relationship with all living beings, including the Earth, or it can separate us, destroying the fabric that holds us together. When we lose the importance of our relationships we suffer, the society suffers––and we have horrifying climate changes that reflect that suffering. When we don't attend to systemic suffering, our deepest wisdom is also lost. We cannot re-member the pieces that once connected us to each other. We grow hungry for ourselves as peacemakers.Fortunately, in revealing the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha’s own enlightenment became ours. We can all enter the vast state of awakened consciousness. The wisdom we seek is in our own experience of initiation and transformation.The initiation begins with our own willingness to not only speak of our suffering but to understand it. In other words, we must begin to use the suffering as a vision quest to see clearly. We must begin to ask the questions, to make the quest happen right where we stand, or with the one who stands in front of us.We have to leave our comfort zone to recover the wisdom from within. Not for ourselves only, but for all that are in despair.If we stay long enough, the wilderness is a place in which we can become discombobulated without the things we know. We are not so certain in the wild. If we could see meditation as entering such wilderness, we can be mediums for the wisdom lost in the spiraling away from what is indigenous to our nature. We are not on a quest to gain a vision but on a quest in which a vision of life might arise on its own — a collective life void of hatred.The Eightfold Path as a transformative process is to sense life as the vision quest itself. We are not seeking to be it but to live it. We are looking into the mysterious darkness. We are looking to see what and whom we have isolated ourselves from. In other words, what surfaces when you hear of murder, rape, and neglect of particular kinds of people? What do you see or not see? What did we leave behind when we left the floor of the forest aeons ago?I'd like to end with this story from the Baka and Aka tribes (usually called Bushmen of South Africa). It is an account of a !Kung shaman called Old K”xau.The shaman spoke of Kauha (God presence) who came to him (before he was a shaman) and asked, "Why is it that people are singing, yet you’re not dancing? And before Old K”xau answered, Kauha took him and they went to the other world of spirits and ancestors. There they traveled, eventually meeting up with spirits that were having a dance. Old K"xau began to join in. But Kauha stopped him and said, Don’t just come and dance. Lie down, he said, and watch how I dance. Soon after Kauha taught Old K"xau to dance in this way, he was taken to his protector who put n/um or healing medicine into him.N/um can only emerge through intense dancing, with the heat of fire. Its heat travels up the spinal cord and enters the head. Once it enters, the healer or shaman can use this n/um to extract illness from others.The Eightfold Path is like n/um coming from the fire: our intense dancing with each other. Our systemic suffering is the intense dance, and the Eightfold Path is the n/um, the medicine, that can be extracted from the heat.[divide style="2"]

zenju-slide1Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest and guiding teacher of Still Breathing Meditation Center in Oakland, CA.

zenju the way of tenderness bookZenju is the author of the forthcoming book The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender (2015, Wisdom Publications).She is  Tell Me Something About Buddhism, with a foreword by Thich Nhat Hanh. She is the contributing author to Dharma, Color, and Culture: an anthology of essays by western Buddhist teachers and practitioners of color (Parallax); and The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-five Centuries of Awakened Women (Wisdom Publications).You can visit her website at zenju.org.[divide style="3"]Robert Aitken Roshi, carrying his signature sign at a protest

About BPF's The System Stinks

Buddhist social justice curriculumTo help promote collective liberation and subvert the highly individualistic bent of much mainstream dharma these days, Buddhist Peace Fellowship presents our second year of The System Stinks — a collection of Buddhist social justice media named for the favorite protest sign of one of our founders, Robert Aitken, Roshi.This year, we've asked some of our favorite dharma teachers, practitioners, and activists to reflect on the Four Noble Truths — suffering; the causes of suffering; cessation of suffering; and a path to cessation — from a systemic, social justice perspective.Other Buddhist groups from around the world have also used the Four Noble Truths as a lens for social movements: for good examples, the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, and the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. In a U.S.-based context (not predominantly Buddhist), where mindfulness is increasingly separated from ethics, we are eager to uphold this social justice tradition.If you like what you see, please comment and share to show the world another side of Buddhism!We are deeply grateful to the teachers and practitioners who lend their voices to this cause. In alignment with our media justice values, all contributors to the 2014 series have been offered humble compensation for their work.

You can support engaged Buddhist media makers by donating to BPF.

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Embody Fierce Compassion: Buddhists at the People's Climate March