How to Be Sick Read Online Free PDF Page B

is not about life bearing down on us from the outside , but instead dukkha is an internal phenomenon of bearing life up from underneath. Joko Beck writes:
    So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we’re being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we’re receiving something that’s making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.
     
     
     
    Just “being” life as it is for me has meant ending my professional career years before I expected to, being house-bound and even bed-bound much of the time, feeling continually sick in the body, and not being able to socialize very often. Using Joko Beck’s teaching, I was able to use these facts that make up my life as a starting point. I began to bow down to these facts, to accept them, to be them. And then from there, I looked around to see what life had to offer.
     
    And I found a lot.
     

The End of Suffering
     
    As I said above, the Buddha didn’t say that life is only suffering, stressful, unsatisfactory. He simply taught that dukkha is present in the life of all beings. Years ago, a law student told me that Buddhism was a pessimistic religion. When I asked him why he thought that, he said, “Well, its first noble truth is: Life sucks.” In trying to explain to him why that was not a valid translation of the Buddha’s teaching, a shift occurred in how I thought of the first noble truth. Yes, it’s true that life brings with it a considerable share of suffering and stress, but happiness and joy are also available to us. The Buddha expressed this by describing life as the realm of the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows. Buddhist teachers focus on those ten thousand sorrows because our inability to see the truth of dukkha in our lives only increases it.
     
    The Buddha said he taught two things: dukkha and the end of dukkha . Before we get into practices that have helped me on the path to the “end of dukkha,” we need to be very clear about the truth of dukkha itself, so we can understand what the “end of dukkha” might mean. It’s fruitless to begin the quest for the end of dukkha until we see that our life is just as it should be—dukkha and all. Do you know a single person, healthy or sick in body, who has not experienced suffering, unsatisfactoriness, anguish, stress, discomfort, dis-ease?
     
    When I taught a class in Tort Law, we spent several weeks studying damages available to plaintiffs in a civil action. “Specials” are those damages for which plaintiff has a receipt: $1,000 for an MRI, for instance. “Generals” are referred to as plaintiff’s “pain and suffering.” No receipts here—the jury is simply asked to put a monetary value on this intangible damage. “Pain and suffering” is a stock phrase in the legal profession. Based on my Buddhist training, I decided to break down this category of damages into “bodily pain and mental suffering” simply because I thought it would help students understand the jury’s task better. The distinction applies here too, because when the Buddha talked about the “end of dukkha , ” he wasn’t referring to putting an end to bodily pain, which is an inescapable part of the human condition. The Buddha was talking about the end of suffering in the mind —the theme of the rest of this book.
     
    After the first noble truth points to the pervasiveness of suffering, the remaining truths start us down the road of what to do about it, how to work on the end of suffering in the mind. The second noble truth says that the reason for dukkha—which we’re thinking of as mental suffering, stress, anguish—is the truth of tanha. The literal translation of tanha is “thirst,” a concept not far from the popular conception of the second noble truth—that the origin of suffering is desire. I think of tanha as the seemingly ever-present mental states of “want” and “don’t want” in our lives.