According to most accounts, the Buddha started out in life as a wealthy prince named Siddhartha. His father, the king, indulged him in every luxury imaginable while keeping all signs of human suffering outside the palace walls hidden away from him. But one day, Siddhartha slipped past the palace guards and ventured out into the real world where, to his dismay, he observed abject poverty, a sick man, and a dead man. He had no idea that humans got sick and died! It was a shock to him; so much so, that he silently slipped away into the night, leaving all his wealth and his luxurious lifestyle, his wife and child behind him, in search for answers to the human condition.

How much is myth and how much is truth we shall never know, but his teachings were recorded, at first orally, and then written down and expanded on over the millennia. He did seem to find fundamental answers to the questions of how to transcend the inherent suffering of being human, or what is often referred to as ‘the human condition’.

Suffering and the human condition

On his quest to find a solution to the problem of suffering inherent in the human condition, the Buddha first encountered a guru in the forest. This guru underwent deep meditation in order to block out his bodily senses and mental formations and find a great stillness within; supposedly merging his inner being or soul with the soul of the universe. In essence, the practice was to cease bodily and mental states in order to acquire an inner calm.

The Buddha was very good at it; so good, in fact, that his guru offered him his own position as leader of a group of like-minded souls in search of truth and inner peace. However, the Buddha became dissatisfied with this approach. He found that when he came out of his meditative state, the problems of being human and the inevitability of suffering still remained. So, he abandoned this path and moved on in his quest.

Austerities

Next, he joined a group of five ascetics or renouncers. They believed in punishing the body to burn off bad elements of their souls, using extreme measures for the purpose of expanding the soul to the size of the universe, and thus attaining enlightenment, which at the time meant freeing themselves from the endless cycle of samsara; the endless cycle of re-birth and death. The Buddha engaged in this practice for six years. He sat in the blazing heat of the sun for hours on end, walked around naked, and he ate only one grain of rice a day. It is said that he could feel his backbone through his stomach.

Finally, the Buddha found that the physical pain was actually clouding his mind, instead of bringing him clarity, or any form of release from suffering. In fact, he concluded that the austerities weren’t providing him with a solution to suffering; rather they were making him suffer even more. So he abandoned the path of self-denial by eating a bowl of rice porridge, disappointing and angering his five fellow renouncers. Six years of penance had all come to nothing.

Radical moderation

What he attempted next was something new. A middle way between self-indulgence and the rigours of self-mortification. Moderation would be his radical new approach from now on. The Buddha’s change of tact would bring a greater clarity to his examination of the human condition. The Buddha came to believe that our minds determine what kind of experiences we have. Throughout history, many others have acknowledged this fundamental truth (especially the Stoics).

Using his meditation skills, he examined the internal workings of his own mind. And what the Buddha discovered contradicted the assumptions people held about the permanence of the ‘soul’, or of the self. He realized that the external world, as we experience it, was constantly changing and that we were constantly changing too! Our material form (body), our feelings, our perceptions, our mental formations, and our consciousness were all in perpetual flux. In Buddhism, this is called impermanence. Therefore, all efforts to identify a permanent self were futile, because a permanent or independent ‘self’ did not exist. Furthermore, identification with the self as a completely isolated entity caused suffering. This is why the Buddha said, ‘Nothing is to be clung to as ‘I, me, or mine.’

The Buddha had this realisation and came to believe that the idea of a permanent self was not the solution to the problem of the human condition but instead, was the root of human suffering, because it made us selfish and self-absorbed.

The delusion of an independent self

The idea of a permanent self created insatiable cravings that enslaved us to transient, earthly concerns and kept us trapped in samsara. To rid oneself of this deep-seated delusion of independent self was the way to liberation. That realisation would allow one the freedom to not be caught in the ‘I, me, or mine’ which is really the fundamental cause of suffering. The Buddha came to believe that there is a way or path to overcoming suffering. His teaching would be based on rediscovering our true nature, which is referred to as ‘non-self nature’.

If we could extinguish the delusion of self, we could see things as they truly are and our suffering would end. We have, then, the capacity to take control over our own lives. He realised that there is a plasticity to our minds and character and that living in the world with the right attitude is fundamentally empowering. He was saying, ‘know yourself and the world is yours’, like the other great thinkers of his time: Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Confucius. It is cognitive psychology twenty-five centuries before the term was invented.

A scientific take on the human condition

Carl Sagan writes, “Our brain compares, synthesises, analyzes, and generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behaviour of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualised behaviour are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.”

It is important to clarify the notion of non-self nature. It is not denying that you exist but rather denying that you are an intrinsically independent entity. You cannot just ‘be’ by yourself; rather you have to ‘inter-be’, a word coined by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The nature of our world, our universe, our reality, is that nothing can exist without every other thing existing.

The first part of Buddhist meditation is asking ourselves the basic question: ‘Who am I?’ This practice is meant to help us see beyond the ‘illusion’ or ‘delusion’ of a separate and permanent self. Are we totally separate from the natural world and all other beings? Is our self, as we perceive it, fixed and permanent, or are we always changing? The Buddha found answers to all these questions.

The Four Noble Truths

At the moment of his awakening at the foot of the Bodhi tree, the Buddha declared, ‘How strange—all beings possess the capacity to be awakened, to understand, to love, to be free—yet they allow themselves to be carried away on the ocean of suffering.’ He saw that night and day we are seeking what is already there in each of us. In Buddhism, it is referred to as Buddha nature or awakened nature. After his awakening under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha sought out his five former renouncers. At first, they rejected him with scorn, but soon they could see that a fundamental change had occurred in him. What he revealed to them was revolutionary.

He had simplified the solution to the problems of the human condition into what he called the Four Noble Truths:

The First Noble Truth simply stated that human suffering was inevitable. ‘There is suffering’. To be human is to suffer. We all experience it.

The Second Noble Truth identified the causes of suffering: craving, delusion and ignorance.

The Third Noble Truth was the critical step. The Buddha taught that since there was an identifiable cause for suffering, then there had to be an identifiable method for ending human suffering. 

The Eightfold Path

The Fourth Noble Truth was the path to the end of suffering, what the Buddha called the Eightfold Path: The Fourth Noble Truth was a systematic approach to the end of human suffering, which is often referred to as dukka, meaning the dispelling of ignorance and the liberation of the mind. Mindfulness is the one element of the path unifying and informing all the others. The eight practices are:

Wise thought | wise view | wise speech | wise action | wise effort | wise livelihood | wise concentration | wise mindfulness

Mindfulness is the unifier

Each of these practices contains all the others. They are different aspects of a unified whole. Thich Nhat Hanh writes, ‘When Right Mindfulness is present, the Four Noble Truths and the Seven other elements of the Eightfold Path are also present.’ By living in the present moment and actually ‘living’ our lives rather than constantly ‘judging’ our lives, judging all of our experiences as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (grasping and aversion); by living in the present moment in real time rather than living in the past and/or the future, we can alleviate much of our own suffering as well as the suffering of others. The Buddha emphasized compassion as well as integrity and wisdom.

The Buddha and his followers mapped out an actual practice in order to overcome human suffering. This is often called Mindfulness. There are many self-help gurus today, who tell us that we need to live in the present moment and that our attitude is important in cultivating better lives. However, they do not actually lay out a practical method for achieving these goals. The Buddha did. Anyone who has seriously tried meditative practices, like sitting meditation, walking meditation, and trying to live mindfully, knows how extremely frustrating it can be. But, I will tell you from my own experience, that although difficult, it is well worth the effort.

Cultivating the seeds of our Buddha nature

The Buddha also believed that beauty and goodness are always there within each of us (often referred to as Buddha nature or basic goodness). This is the basic teachings of the Buddha. A true spiritual teacher is one who encourages us to look deeply in ourselves for the beauty and the love that we are seeking. The true teacher is someone who helps you to discover the teacher in yourself. According to the Buddha, the birth of a human being is not a beginning but a continuation, and when we’re born, all the different kinds of seeds—seeds of goodness, of cruelty, of awakening—are already in us.

We do not have to believe in reincarnation or previous lives in order to understand this. Even if we only believe in science, of our own genetic codes, we can see that we have inherited many seeds. Whether the goodness or cruelty in us is revealed depends on what seeds we cultivate, our actions, and our way of life. Buddhist mindfulness practices and its emphasis on compassion, integrity, and wisdom can help us cultivate seeds that not only alleviates our own suffering, caused by delusion and ignorance, but also the suffering of others.

The map of the human condition

The Buddha had no instruments other than his own mind to work with and chose to look deeply into the nature of birth and death and the inevitability of human suffering. He learned through extreme effort to stabilize his own mind in order to look deeply into the universe and the vast array of interconnected phenomena within it. The Buddha and his followers explored the nature of mind and the nature of life. Their efforts led to remarkable discoveries. The Buddhists successfully mapped out a guide or map which is quintessentially human; aspects of the mind that we all have in common as humans, regardless of our beliefs or cultural backgrounds.

These discoveries can be explored by anyone, anytime, anywhere and we can learn for ourselves what is to be found. Therefore, we all have the ability to become our own teachers, which is exactly what the Buddha suggested and taught from the beginning.