What Nutriments Do We Feed Our Suffering?

Thầy elucidates the understanding of suffering within Buddhism as revealed in the Buddha’s first sermon, “Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma” (c. 528 BCE), in which he delivered The Four Noble Truths: 1. The Truth of Suffering (it is inherent to being), 2. The Truth of the Cause of Suffering (our craving), 3. The Truth of the Cessation of Suffering (it is possible); and, 4. The Truth of the Path to the Cessation of Suffering (by following the central tenets). The Buddha suffered like all human beings, and this fact is what makes his teaching accessible, practical, and healing for the human condition. Our suffering—our heart—is the path to the Buddha’s heart. By sharing his own suffering, Thầy models his exhortation to show and to name our suffering, since to deny or avoid it only generates more. Suffering is holy within Buddhism because without it we could not find the path to emancipation from it.

Thầy illustrates the non-duality of suffering/emancipation with his metaphor of the garbage or compost and the flower: without one, there cannot be the other. The bitter, universal pill is not only that our pain—our physical illness, our difficult relationship, our depression—exists, but that it is our own desire—our fear, our denial, our habit energy—that is a nutriment by which we feed that suffering. Thầy teaches us that the hard, necessary work is to sit with our suffering, to understanding the nutriments we feed it, to recognize how it is part of who we are, and, only in that way, come to understand it as it really is. Once the inevitable existence of suffering arises, it is up to us to take care of it, to heal it, to take it as “the object of our meditation.” And, Thầy urges, this difficult self-work can be eased by relying upon the support of the Sangha.

This is the second talk in a series of twelve given during The Heart of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 1996. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.