“The triple world is not peaceful.
It is like the burning house.
It is full of sufferings.
It is dreadful.
There are always the sufferings
Of birth, old age, disease and death.
They are like flames
Raging endlessly.”
Lotus Sutra, Chapter III
Having covered birth we now move to old age. Sometimes when explanations of these sufferings is given there is another step included which covers growth before old age. I think that as I write about old age I will include growth as well, because there is certainly potential for suffering as well.
Traditionally it is taught that the first sermon of the Buddha was the Four Noble Truths the first of which is the truth that there is suffering. The following three noble truths depending upon how they are translated can lead a person to think that the Buddha was teaching us a way to completely avoid any suffering in life at all. I think this would be a misunderstanding and a misleading way to ever interpret the Buddha’s most important message.
I think what the Buddha sets out to do is first to recognize that suffering is simply a fact of our very existence. The Buddha lost his mother during child his own birth. In spite of the purported lavish and luxurious lifestyle the Buddha’s father heaped upon his son, nothing could remove the fact that by his very birth the Buddha lost his mother, and the complicated grief dynamics that potentially sets in motion. The Buddha lived his whole life possibly wondering about the mother he never had.
No matter what we do as living human beings we will always be susceptible to suffering, it is as the Buddha teaches simply a fact of life. What the Buddha set out to accomplish I think was how do we manage, how do we respond to, and how do we live with that very reality. Suffering causes emotions and how do we ensure that our emotional response, either negatively or positively, does not either complicate the suffering or even lead to more suffering.
After birth, whether it is a baby, or a new idea, or a job, or a brand new car there ideally is a period of perhaps some growing pains or even some relative calm and stability. I have never raised a baby so all of my information is via third parties, but I have heard that babies are constantly changing, they are growing, they are learning, and they are pooping. And they just keep growing until they eventually grow up to be fully independent beings capable of living on their own after roughly 18-20 years of eating parents out of house and home and causing untold griefe either as rebellious teenagers or perhaps some other act of separation from the family nest.
Of course I remember some of this as a first hand experience of the rebellious part, of the leaving home part and establishing my own life; thankfully I did not have to experience it from my parents perspective, and for that I must express gratitude to my parents for putting up with what they did.
Ideas frequently have a similar trajectory, a new club or organization, or a new business; new restaurants frequently have rocky births. Then after things get going they may settle down some and achieve a certain amount of stability, though not always. Sometimes right after conception and birth things deteriorate rapidly and become ‘old’ perhaps nearing death.
I have known restaurants that have had a grand launch and then three weeks later you can already feel the life has gone out and the place is on its last legs, even when the food was perfectly good. The demise or the old age of the business may have been caused by poor planning, or poor management, or just simply because it happens.
Old age is not simply a collection of wrinkled skin or a bag of frail bones. While it is that it is also about ideas and attitudes, it is about the afternoon and early evening of the day, it is about the third quarter in a game sometimes, it is about the failure of a business to adapt it’s product to changing technologies and slowly becoming obsolete.
Old age is many outward experiences but it is also an inner journey and experience as well. It is about a person realizing that things done as a teenager or early adolescent are either not possible or not completely appropriate; the time has passed. Old age is about realizing there are other more appropriate activities to engage in such as processing knowledge into wisdom to be passed down to future generations. Old age is an inner journey into both preparing to let go of life, but also to experience the joys of life from a completely new perspective unencumbered by the pressure of the achievement driven youth.
Old age can be both scary and exciting, whether viewed as some event outside our life or as something to do with our life. It is not an easy journey regardless and there is the struggle with suffering constantly present just as suffering is present in growth. As we grow up towards old age the suffering is perhaps the fear of failure. In old age it is the fear of letting go, and the fear of death.
In all of these, suffering is a fact of our very existence, not to be avoided. We only cause ourselves more suffering is we think there is some way to magically escape entirely from suffering. What I believe Buddhism teaches us though, and I base this not just on theory but also on some personal life experience as I move into old age, what Buddhism teaches is a way to manage suffering, a way to experience suffering through truth. Buddhism teaches us a way to move into suffering with grace and strength and courage knowing that just as happiness is not without end so too is suffering and so we proceed through life in all situations making the causes that will cause us the least amount of further suffering.
Next week we get to talk about disease, something I witness almost every day in the hospital.
