The Components of Suffering

　　Thanissaro Bhikkhu

　　May, 2003

　　Let your mind settle in. Stay with the breath. There”s nowhere else you have to go, nothing else you have to do right now. Just be with your breathing. When the breath comes in, you know it”s coming in. When the breath goes out, you know it”s going out. Allow it to come in and go out in a way that feels good and refreshing. If you”re feeling tired, you may want to breathe in a way that”s energizing. If you”re feeling frenetic, breathe in a way that”s more calming. Gain a sense of what the breath can do for the body and the mind here in the present moment.

　　Do what you can to put the mind in a good mood. In other words, if you approach the process of meditation with a lot of anxiety, with a lot of frustration, that anxiety and frustration will show up in the breath and simply make things worse. So remind yourself: Not too much is demanded of you right now, just being with the breath. If you notice you”ve wandered off, just bring the mind right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again and try to make the breath even more comfortable. As you keep at this, you find that the mind develops a stronger and stronger foundation, a place where it can stay, a place where it really feels safe, where it feels at home, where it can look at the larger issues in life and not mess them up.

　　The Buddha talks about suffering as his number one truth, and when we hear about that, many of us want to run away. We feel that we have enough suffering in life; we don”t want to hear about it anymore. But the Buddha”s whole reason for teaching about suffering is because he has a cure. To work that cure, though, you first have to get the mind in good shape, because most of us, when we deal with suffering, simply make the issue worse. We feel threatened by it, we feel surrounded by it, we start getting desperate, and in our desperation we do all kinds of things that are harmful, both to ourselves and to people around us. So first get the mind in a good mood. All you need is the breath coming in and out with a sense of wellbeing. If you”re really observant and become familiar with the breath over time, you find that that sense of wellbeing starts permeating throughout other parts of your life as well. And when you”ve got a sense of wellbeing you can depend on, then you can turn to the issue of suffering to see exactly what suffering is, looking at it not so much out of desperation as out of curiosity. As the Buddha said, the best way to deal with suffering is to comprehend it, as in the passage we chanted just now. He said most people don”t discern suffering. We suffer, we feel it, but we don”t discern it, we don”t understand it. The Buddha said that if you understand it, you can manage it, you can put an end to it. If you don”t understand it, you just keep on suffering and never put an end to it at all.

　　In his first sermon he describes suffering: the suffering of birth, the suffering of aging, the suffering of illness, the suffering of death, of being separated from what you love, of being conjoined with things you don”t like, of not getting what you want. That seems to be a pretty good summation, but then he boils it down to even more basic terms. This is where the discussion gets technical. He analyses suffering down to five heaps, five clinging-aggregates: form imbued with clinging, feeling imbued with clinging, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness, all imbued with clinging. The clinging is the important element. It”s what turns ordinary form, feeling, and so forth, into suffering. We”re often told that these aggregates are the Buddha”s description of what we are, but that wasn”t his purpose in formulating this teaching. His purpose was to give us tools for breaking suf…

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