I had a piece at PJM a few days ago on Brit Hume and Tiger Woods.  Now, that attracted a number of, um, interesting commenters, including one guy from My Old Home Town (extra credit to anyone who catches that literary reference) who I’ve run into off and on for years.  He’s a commenter who lurks on the edge of trollery most of the time, but manages to be somewhat interesting.  He also, sadly, becomes sufficiently obnoxious and obsessive that I’ve seen him, over the years, get banned in a number of places.

For some reason, he’s getting caught, sometimes, in various spam filters.  And therein lies the lesson, which I’m going to repeat from comments at PJM.

It’s actually a nice demonstration of some of the teachings of the Buddha: you start in ignorance, not understanding that this isn’t my blog. (See the list of editors over there? They’re called “editors” because they edit PJM.)

Out of ignorance arises illusion, samsara: since you think it’s my blog, you think I’m modding your comments, and worse modding them in ways you can’t grasp.

Out of illusion arises duhkha, frustration, and from that frustration arises anger: you get pissed off at me for modding your comments.

Out of anger, then, arises action (karma): you start posting the same comments repeatedly, six or seven times, and get more intemperate in your phrasing. As some of them are rejected — I know, for example, that akismet looks at repeated reposting as a sign of spamming, so I suspect that you are training akismet to reject you — this reinforces your feeling that you’re being maltreated and at that maltreated by me personally. So here’s the fruit of the action, the result of the cause, the vipaka: your illusion leads to anger which leads to action which makes it more likely that you’ll be filtered again.

Sure enough, the Buddha has good advice for how to get out of this: resolve the ignorance, and see I’m not in control. Then you can resolve the illusion and wonder what else might be involved. That might then lead you to wonder if the combination of your idiosyncratic posts with extra headers, your multiple postings of the same post, and your history of having been banned on multiple other blogs might be leading to your posts being caught by automated spam filters here and (as we know) also at Anchoress. So you could modify your behavior to no longer do those things, which would lead to your not being filtered so much, which would mean you’d be more satisfied at your ability to say these things you think are important.

So, from the end of ignorance, you have the opportunity to end the frustration, the duhkha. You stop doing the things (karma) that lead to the bad fruits (vipaka) of what you’re doing, which leads to greater peace of mind.

I think everyone should thank you for this lovely illustration.

When that happens, I start feeling something else: I feel that there is something wrong with me. I’m certainly not alone in this. In fact, I’ve been reading Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach, and also listening to her podcasts. She is a therapist who also has a long-time Buddhist practice, and before that a long time as a yogini in an ashram.

She tells an interesting story. The Dalai Lama was visiting a seminar for Buddhist-oriented therapists, and one of the therapists asks how to deal in a Buddhist fashion with the feeling of self-hate, the feeling that one is not valuable, not good enough, not acceptable?

HHDL[1] said, “The what? Is that some kind of emotional disease?” When they assured him it was one of the most common emotional issues in the West, he was basically dumbfounded.

Now, it’s easy to see how he might find this a little odd: he had, after all, been told since he was about five years old that he was the fourteenth incarnation of a great Lama, and the incarnation of Avalokitesvara Boddhisattva besides. I’d be very curious to find out if that’s common among regular civilian Tibetans, much less Chinese, Mongolians, and so on, but that’s just an aside. In the mean time, though, I want to talk about that sense in itself. Tara’s whole book talks about dealing with that sense of yourself through consciously taking tender regard for yourself.

“Tender regard” here has a name in Pali and Sanskrit. In Pali it’s metta; in Sanskrit maitri(मैत्रि).[2] The word is often translated “lovingkindness,” which I think sounds a little goofy, but there it is, that’s the translation you’d usually find.

In any case, though, the emotion, the feeling, is pretty familiar. It’s the feeling of kind regard you have, for example, when you see a kitten or a puppy.

You are here.

In the Mettasutta, Buddha teaches a particular way of training ourselves to evoke this feeling. This is called metta practice.

It begins with yourself. Compose yourself for meditation, get comfortably seated, and then say to yourself:

May I be well.
May I be happy.
May I be free.
May I be at peace.

While you say those phrases, try to remember how you felt about the kitten picture (or if you’re one of those people who doesn’t like kittens the hell with you you can imagine a puppy, or a newborn baby, or whatever.) The point is, though, to feel that particular feeling about yourself.

You then, to continue the practice, extend that to someone you love.

May she be well.
May she be happy.
May she be free.
May she be at peace.

Extend it to someone to whom you’re pretty indifferent.

May the guy at the desk in the health club be well.
May the guy at the desk in the health club be happy.
May the guy at the desk in the health club be free.
May the guy at the desk in the health club be at peace.

Extend it to someone you dislike.

May Jerry Seinfeld be well.
May Jerry Seinfeld be happy.
May Jerry Seinfeld be free.
May Jerry Seinfeld be at peace.

You continue this to larger and larger groups, until (if you’re feeling mystical) you extend it to “all sentient beings through this and all the innumerable Dharma realms.” In each case, though, you’re trying to retain that feeling of metta and of karuna: you are striving to feel tender regard and compassion for them.

What’s interesting is that, based on Tara’s book, I’m starting to understand something about that first stage: when I’m feeling, as I am now, that I’m not good enough, inadequate, some kind of freak, I need to remember to have metta and karuna for myself.

This is a little tricky.

One definition of karuna I’ve seen is “understanding without judging.” Of course, when I feel like I’m not good enough, that’s the very opposite of “understanding without judging.” Instead, I get caught up telling myself a story that I should have done something different, that I should be someone different. What I get caught in that story, I feel like hell. When I’m telling an editor (as I was this week) that I didn’t get the check because they sent the check to my old mailing address, even though I made a special effort to warn them that they needed to use my new mailing address, the story I’m telling myself is about how I’m bad for causing them trouble.

This is the very definition of duhkha. In fact (stealing a line from Tara, who was quoting someone else) the heart of duhkha is telling ourselves that things should be somehow different. Of course, the next step of that is to remember that the editor was in a position I could easily have been in myself; extend metta and karuna to the editor as well. But, truthfully, at least for me the issue is usually not about someone else, it’s about myself: what did I do, why did it happen, what did I do to deserve this? Remembering to practice metta helps me break that habit.

1. This is apparently how insiders refer to him: “His Holiness the DalaiLama.”
2. A small warning: I’m just learning devanagari, so don’t take my spelling as authoritative. If you are reading this and catch an error, please leave a comment.

• “A deep awareness of and sympathy for another’s suffering.”
• “Understanding without judgment.”

So that’s easy … but how does a Buddha do that? A Buddha’s compassion is supposed to be limitless — but how can a Buddha have compassion for Hitler, or Mao, or Josef Mengele?

I puzzled about this for a long time, until one of my teachers told me this story.[1]

It seems when the Buddha was teaching, he’d often receive visitors in the afternoons, and answer questions. The thing was, he’d answer anyone‘s questions: a thief, a murderous warrior, an untouchable, a whore. Finally, someone asks him — maybe Sariputra, the perpetual straight man — how it is that he can be calm and not judge these people?

The World-Honored One said, “Sariputra, when I awoke, I had access to all the events of all past incarnations. Now, when I meet a warrior, I remember what it is like to be a warrior, and know that I am a human; I too have the capacity to be a warrior, if the chain of dependent causation had led to that moment in that lifetime. The casteless one, I know, is just like me except for the fact of the causes that led to his birth. So also, the prostitute and the thief. Thus, the Tathagata recognizes that those conditions are themselves dependent, and therefore empty and have no inherent meaning.”

Sariputra thanked the Buddha for his teaching, but he was clearly still troubled, so the World Honored One asked if he had a further question. “If those conditions have no inherent meaning, how can we say ‘do this,’ and ‘don’t do that’? Is it not true that then everything is permissible?”

“Ah, not so, Sariputra,” the World-Honored One said. “For when I saw through to all the events of all past incarnations, I saw that the warrior I was, in later life, lost a limb, lost his sons, and eventually died when his Kingdom was conquered by another. Thus I saw that his actions were not productive and did not lead to liberation; and so I instructed our warrior in the ways that lead to liberation from duhkha. So also, the prostitute I recall, though she became a great courtesan and immensely wealthy, found that also did not lead to liberation; thus I taught our visitor the Eightfold Path that leads to liberation. Thus also the thief; thus, also, the casteless one. All of them, every one, sickens of the same disease; their deeds arise from duhkha, which arises from attachment, and thus in understanding, I teach them that which releases them from attachment and thus that from which their deeds arise. Just as I would not judge someone who was lame for their inability to walk, so I would not judge someone whose deeds arise from the disease of attachment.”

This story came to mind again when Jesse Helms died recently. I won’t bother to link to comments about Helms, either favorable or unfavorable: you will have no trouble finding stories about Helms that express great admiration, and even love, and others that deride him. Tony Snow, Tim Russert, Osama, Obama, Hillary, Ghandiji, me — all people, all in the same world of cause and effect, of dukhka and the attachment that leads to the arising of duhkha.

The Buddha’s Compassion, then, comes from that recognition that all of us are subject to attachment, from which duhkha arises; the Buddha sees that all their deeds are simply effects of causes, and therefore empty. Hating Jesse Helms is like hating an HIV patient for their virus: unproductive, and not leading to happiness or peace, either for them or for yourself.

1. I don’t remember which one, and frankly I even faintly remember making it up, or modifying it, for myself. If so, well, sometimes you are your own best teacher, but I hate to ake credit for it.

The Bodhisattvas are great tricksters,
Sacrificing their own purity to save all sentient beings.
But their words only cloud the glass.
Better they had kept their mouths closed.

(From Broken Koans; I’m betting he didn’t understand.)

Matthieu Ricard at Google.

Now, that’s not to say that some Buddhist concepts aren’t inherently a little difficult to grasp: after all, Gautama didn’t get to be the World-Honored One, Sage of the Shakyas, and so forth without having come up with something at least a little surprising. But sometimes I think the desire to make things seem Cool, and Interesting, and Deep, and Mystical leads to more difficulty in translation than it needs to.

So, today we’re going to consider a technical term in Buddhism that requires some thought and care to understand, and some caution when you see it. That term is Śūnyatā, or “emptiness.”

That term led to my friend Annie Gottlieb feeling like one of the paragraphs of my exegesis (there’s a word you don’t get to use every day) of the Heart Sutra just didn’t work. After I write this piece, I’ll go back and correct it, but I needed to talk about “emptiness”, and have something to refer to, before I could really do what I wanted. So let’s talk about “emptiness.”

The word isn’t all that complicated, or it wouldn’t seem so: the root word is the Sanskrit word for “zero”: Sunya. Sunyata (I’m not going to bother with the diacriticals any more), then, is just “zero-ness”.

I know: my, that’s helpful.

So let’s go back to my old familiar analogy, the game of pool. When you start out, the balls are neatly, if temporarily, racked in a nice triangle. Each time you make a shot, the balls are re-arranged, and as tempting as it is to think otherwise, it’s the exact details of how you hit the shot, the surface of the table, and the history or any flaws or chips, or changes in the balls, that determine what the arrangement of the balls will be when they come to a (temporary) stop.

Now, let’s shift our attention to my cat Kaleo, who happens to be sitting next to me right now. He’s a tuxedo cat, black and white, and he and his brother Ali’i have been with me since they were foundling kittens; the vet introduced them to my Abyssinian cat Radar while I was out of town once, because he was missing my Siamese cat Vashti, who had passed away at 17 a few months earlier. Consider everything that led to him sitting next to me, amusing me by his very presence: hundreds of cans of cat food, dozen of bags of dry food, vet visits and all; the affinity he had with Radar, so that I didn’t want to separate them; the fact that he happened to be in that vet’s office, that week.

He has probably consumed a hundred pounds of food since he came here, but he doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds — more like eight. Most every molecule or atom he has now is not a molecule that was part of the little kitten I brought home, and the cat I have today. While he has clear connections with the kitten (he still likes to hang upside down from the edge of my futon sofa), he also can’t or doesn’t do some things he used to do as a kitten. The particular arrangement of stuff that is a “Kaleo” sitting by my window is the product, the result, of trillions of little events down to the level of electrons and atoms and up to the level of the vet putting him into the same space as Radar one day in September.

But, then, where is Kaleo? No matter how much I look, I can’t find anything that is “Kaleo” except for the arrangement of atoms that persistence of memory, even persistence of vision, make out of the various tiny events that are continuously proceeding, all a result of cause and effect. Go back to our pool table, and we see the same thing, with much bigger pieces: the balls are in a neat triangular arrangement at first, then they’re scattered about apparently chaotically (except, if you watched a fast-forward video of the game, you’d see how each ball always ended up exactly where it had to go) and at the end, most all of the balls are gathered neatly into the pockets — before coming back to the nice triangle again.

This, then, is “emptiness”, “sunyata”. Not non-existence — pet Kaleo and he purrs; hit the cue ball and it clicks — but no independent existence: nothing we see exists independently of cause and effect, and there is nothing that we can point to that has some unchanging, unconditioned existence. So when we read the Heart Sutra, the prajñaparamitahridayasutra, we see that Avalokitesvara “saw (through) the five skandhas, saw they were empty of independent existence” this is what he/she saw:

• look at the forms of things: beloved cats don’t exist independently, and neither do wars and disasters and television shows and iPods and pepper mills,
• so nothing that comes of our perceptions of these forms can have unconditioned existence,
• which means that nothing that comes to us as part of the mental formations that arise from the perceptions can have unconditioned existence,
• which in turn means that when we identify those mental formations and connect them to our history, our language, our history, none of those connections can have unconditioned existence,
• which means, finally, that our whole sense of ourselves, our sense of being “who we are”, can have no unconditioned existence.

(What about “souls”, you ask? Bodhidharma, the man Zen tradition says brought Buddhism to China, was asked just that question. He answered, “show me this soul thing you’re talking about and I’ll tell you if it has unconditioned existence.”)

The answer he saw is called the Four Great Truths. Go ahead, follow the links, it won’t hurt for long. The Four Great Truths are easily summarized:

1. Life seems painfully unsatisfactory. Things suck.
2. Life is unsatisfactory because it’s transitory, and we insist on trying to deny it. We cling to things as they are. The sickness is duhkha and clinging is its cause.
3. There is an escape from the pain of this unsatisfactory nature of our relationship to the world. There is a cure for duhkha.
4. The cure for duhkha is to learn to cease to cling, and there are methods to learn to do that.

One imagines the five Samanas, the ascetics who had been his companions and who because his first students, saying two things: “Well, duh!” and “Right. And how do we do that, bwana?”

(No, I haven’t a clue how one says “bwana” in Sanskrit.)

So, Buddha laid out a program through which anyone could apply themselves, “see through” as he did to Reality, and free themselves of duhkha. This program has eight components, so it’s called the “Eight Step Path”.

Now, this may sound a little odd to my readers who are already familiar with Buddhism. In Sanskrit, its arya astanga marga, which is normally translated the “Holy Eightfold Path” but arya means, at its root, “well behaved” or “well mannered” or even “like a guest”. It became “noble” by a sort of subcontinental noblesse oblige: an upper-caste person was expected to be well-mannered, and it became “holy” because the best-mannered were supposed to be the Brahmanas, the preist caste. So the Sanskrit would also be something like “eight principles of good behavior” as well as “Holy Eightfold path.” Sanskrit is cool that way.

On the other hand, good old concrete Chinese just makes it ba¹ zheng⁴ dao⁴ 八正道, which is “eight correct principles .” Chinese is cool that way.

Okay, I’ll grant that “Eight Step Program” is an, um, idiosyncratic translation, but I think it’s a pretty good one. On my list of things to write in the future, I’ve got a to-do for “How to translate Sanskrit without sounding like a goon.” Until I write it, remember that Sanskrit became a high-falutin’ language of literature — and an extraordinarily beautiful one, if you ask me — about 1300 years after Gautama. What Gautama spoke was, well, just talk, and he wasn’t talking the talk to people with graduate degrees in literary Sanskrit. At least with Buddhism, I think we should prefer a simple, sort of Hemingway, translation.

For Gautama, this was language in which people gave directions to the next village, and the Eightfold Path is just Buddha giving directions.

The directions aren’t really very complicated, either, although following them means breaking some very ingrained habits, and that’s always hard. It can take a lot of practice, and and you have a lot of missteps and regressions and misatkes to make. But then, those are part of the practice as well.

So, when his Samana companions said “how the hell do we do that?”, Gautama laid it out in eight steps, eight practices. I’m going to summarize those eight practices here, and then I’ll have a series of posts on each practice in order to lay them out more clearly.

The Eight Steps really break down into three groups. First, there’s the group of simply understanding the goal.

The first step of the program is simple enough to understand. Before you can follow Gautama’s program, you have to recognize that things do suck around you, that this comes from clinging, and that the end of suckitude is to cease to cling: you have to at least start to grasp the Four Great Truths. Once your view of the world includes this correct understanding, you’ve got your start. So, the first step is called “Right (in the sense of ‘correct’) View.”

Next, you have to decide you want to stop being trapped by duhkha. Don’t think this is easy. Once you have, though, you establish the intention to “go beyond”. So this step is called “Right Intention.”

Now, how do we do this? The next three steps have to do with ordering our lives so we are living our lives in a way that doesn’t impede us from following our Right Intention. These are the basis of a Buddhist morality, but there’s a place at which we’re ready to fall into another “let’s be all religious about this” trap. As people who have grown up in a Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic framework, we’re trained, conditioned, to think of “religious” teachings in terms of Commandments.

Buddha’s program isn’t like that. There are no Judges (and no one, really, to be judged, just to be all Zen about it for a moment.) These — and in fact all the steps — are just recognition that there are things which make it easier to cease to cling, and things which make it harder. It’s like gravity: if you insist on carrying a hundred pound sandbag, it’ll be harder to climb a mountain. On the other hand, if you can put the sandbag down, it’ll be easier. With some training and a good coach, you can even learn to run up the mountain.

Which is really the key: Buddha isn’t Moses handing down stone tablets. Buddha is your coach. The next three steps, then, are really just the training program.

The third practice he suggests is to avoid lying, gossiping, and saying hurtful things, while trying always to be truthful, clear, and say compassionately helpful things. This is called “Right Speech.”

The fourth practice is to avoid doing things that will make trouble for us. Avoid taking life — even when it’s justified, as it sometimes is, the impact on us can be harsh. Better to avoid it when you can. Avoid taking things that aren’t freely given to you. And avoid sexual misconduct — which doesn’t mean simply “avoid sex” although that can be an easier way of it in some circumstances. But anyone who watches the E! Channel has seen how sexual conduct can get in the way of living a life free of clinging and suffering. This is called “Right Action.”

Even a Buddha has to eat. We need to make our livelihood, so Buddha coaches us to avoid things which lead us away from Right Action: stealing, deceitfully tricking people into doing things for us, “gold digging” and so on, while looking for things which lead to other people also having fewer obstacles, which can be anything from writing good software to massage therapy to collecting garbage. This is called “Right Livelihood.”

Let me point out, in passing because I intend to write more about it in another article, that this is also the basis for a fairly concise and attractive system of morality or ethics. A person who practices Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood will be a good neighbor, whatever else they might be.

These steps, though, are just preparing the ground. This third group is about changing ourselves. To finally cease from clinging, and thus be liberated from duhkha, we have to change not just our actions — although that’s important and helpful — we have to change our minds.

To do so, we have to pay attention, and make the effort to correct our thoughts and actions when they slip. This sixth step is called “Right Effort”.

Seventh, we have to learn to attend to our thoughts effectively. We need to notice what our thoughts are so we can learn to correct them; we need to know when we’re slipping to know when to catch ourselves. This is “Right Attention”.

Finally, the eighth step is to learn to free even our thoughts of clinging, especially clinging to words, thoughts, past troubles, and future desires. Buddha taught his students a couple of simple ways to do this, which he called upaya, “skillful means.” These practices, that clear the mind of clinging, are “Right Meditation.”

And that’s the list, then:

1. Right View
2. Right Intention
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Attention
8. Right Meditation

The neatly racked pool balls wonder, “Have I been racked before? Is there a game after this game?”

Think about playing pool, and just for precision, let’s think about playing pool in a dive bar in Apex, North Carolina. It’s a quarter a game table, and it’s probably been there since the 60′s, so the table surface and the balls have seen some mileage. You find the rack, and rack the balls, and break. The balls scatter; where they go is determined not just by the power of the cue shot and the point of impact, but by the whole history of the balls, the table, and the bar, which means it’s not just the cue shot, but the exact way the balls were tightened against one another, the particular way the eight ball was oriented in that rack, and the tiny scratches on the cue ball from the time Lloyd hit the scratch that wasn’t so much a scratch as a chip shot into the middle booth. All of them affect the eventual outcome.

That’s karma. It’s cause and effect; karma is “action”, causes, and the playing out of karma the effects. When the balls come to rest — or “rest”, because the table isn’t perfectly level and the new highway has eighteen-wheelers thundering past the back wall not a hundred feet from the table — the exact place they came to rest and the way they react on the next shot will be established by all those influences, the trucks and the chip shot, the mining and manufacturing, the deposition of ores and the formation of metals in a supernova, all of it, back to the beginning of the universe.

When Gautama saw through to the nature of the whole problem of dukkha[1], this was one of the things he saw. The whole universe that he was looking at, from the pretty little Untouchable girl who gave him her rice pudding to the massive statue of Shiva, to the fish in the water and the bugs they were eating, to the Sun and stars and all, all of them came from somewhere, and they were all going somewhere. Things change: as little as we like it, they aren’t the same. (A few thousand miles away, at about the same time, a Greek called Heraclitus in Ephesus would say “everything flows; all created things go, and remain not at all”.) Everything we see now has an antecedent, something that came before; everything we see now will have succedents, things that come after, and none of them will stay the same. This is karma, this is what karma really is. You don’t need “lords of karma” to judge and issue decrees; the universe doesn’t “obey”; it’s just what the universe is.

Gautama had some trouble explaining this. In fact, he comes back to is over and over again, making new analogies, telling new parables, from the day he first explained the Four Great Truths to the last few words he gave his followers as he lay dying. Everything, even the most solid of objects, even the World Honored One, is just a pattern, a temporary eddy in the flow.

It’s an illusion. (“Maya”. There’s the other word that gets horribly translated.) It’s an illusion — the whole world around us is an illusion — not because it’s not “real” in some mystical sense — strike the stone Buddha, it certainly seems real enough — but because all the things we see as “real” are just temporary arrangements, under the control of karma, that will pass, change, dissolve. As solid as the stone Buddha may seem, it was once a raw unfigured stone, and it will be a trail of sand some day in the future.

This, this impermanence, is the real source of dukkha: at the bottom of it all, things that change are unsatisfactory. They cause us dis-ease. They cause us to suffer.

1. Just in passing, this is the Pali spelling, not the Sanskrit, which is duhkha; sorry, my mistake. Since I started using this spelling though, I’m going to continue with it.

So, now what?

Gautama had solved the problem; he had gone beyond clinging, gone beyond attachment, had liberated himself from the Wheel of Causes and Effects — all technical terms for laughing at himself as he saw that he, along with every other human on the planet, had been making himself miserable and that he could have, at any moment, stopped. So he got up from his place under the ficus tree that would forever after be called the Bodhi Tree, Shri Maha Bodhi, and wandered off to look for breakfast.

No one really noticed. He was just another wandering holy man, cleaner and better fed than most perhaps. He didn’t need to be noticed, although anyone who saw him or met him was struck by how gentle he seemed, by how he was everyone’s equal, by how children and animals trusted him. He went on like this for weeks, until one man, perhaps a little more observant than most, saw the calm and poise in his face and thought it … not quite human.

He stopped Buddha on the road and asked, “Are you a God?”

Buddha smiled at the question, and said “No, not a God.”

“Are you an Angel, a Deva? A Rakasha, a demon?”

“No, neither an angel nor a demon.”

“Are you a saint then? A holy man?”

“No, I’m not a saint.”

“But you are clearly not a man like other men.”

“No, I am not.”

“What are you then?”

Buddha said, “I am awake.”

In due time, Buddha came to the Deer Park in Sarnath and met the other shramanas he had accompanied for the years of his time as an ascetic. When they saw him coming, the yelled at him, called him names, called him a quitter and an apostate … until they noticed it wasn’t bothering him, and in fact that he was so gentle with them that they realized they were angry — they, holy men, renunciates, devoted ones, had become angry — and out of embarrassment stopped. Then one of them shyly asked him “what has happened to you Siddhartha Gautama?”

“I woke up.”

Then they realized that here was one man who had achieved what they wanted to achieve, and they begged him to teach them how they too could become awake. So Buddha told them about the first three Great Truths, and seeing that merely hearing the Great Truths wasn’t enough, went on to describe a method by which they, too could awaken. This was the Fourth Great Truth: that there is a way to learn to wake up.

This method, Buddha’s original self-help program, was called the Noble Eightfold Path, because Buddha gave the shramanas who became his first followers eight basic steps for their own practice.

So these are the Four Great Truths: that ordinary life is unsatisfactory; that the unsatisfactory nature of life arises because we cling to things that are by their nature impermanent; that by ceasing to cling to impermanent things, life ceases to be unsatisfactory; and that there is a way, a program, called the Eightfold Path through which any human can wake up.