As the pandemic drags on, and the news never seems to stop, Buddhists are celebrating Dharma Day and reflecting on the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths
It never stops. Some of the Covid restrictions may be ending, but not the disease. And the news never ends. My mother was a little girl in the Second Wold War and each evening her father would shush her to be quiet while he listened to the radio to hear the latest developments. She couldn’t wait for the War to end because then, she thought, there’d be no more news and her father wouldn’t be so grumpy.
Well, the news is still with us and there’s no sign that we’ll ever get to the end of the world’s problems. That could sounds glib, dismissing genuine suffering and important efforts to address it. But perhaps the underlying issue is how we can live, happily and creatively, in an imperfect world. This is the fundamental concern of Buddhist teachings. The Buddhist name for those teachings is the Dharma and we celebrate them today, in the Dharma Day festival.
The story goes that a few weeks after the Buddha’s Enlightenment he sought out five former companions and, at the time of the July full moon, he communicated his insights into the nature of life.
The Buddha presented his outlook as Four Truths, structured on the model of a medical diagnosis. First, the symptom: we suffer painful experiences we can’t avoid and we struggle to find lasting satisfaction. Then the cause, which in this account he terms ‘Craving’: an unrealistic desire for security and certainty. His prescription is that we must abandon craving; and the treatment is a path of practice that touches the whole of our lives.
The Buddha said: ‘What I teach is suffering and the end of suffering’. In other words, it’s about understanding how we suffer and what we can do to address the underlying causes of our suffering. We learn to stop craving for security and gain a wisdom that aligns our inner world with the difficult facts of life. The Dharma focuses our attention on our experience, rather than metaphysics or things that we more usually associate with religion like God and the Soul.
Whatever you may think of the answers offered by the Dharma, I think the questions it addresses are as relevant as ever. What does it mean to live in a world that is never free from old age, sickness and death; where our problems are never finally resolved; and where the news never ends?
