The Buddha began his explanation of the first noble truth—the truth of suffering—not with a definition but with a list of common examples: the suffering of birth, aging, and death; of sorrow, lamentation, physical pain, distress, and despair; of association with the unbeloved, of separation from the loved, and of not getting what you want.
Except for the last, none of these examples needs any explanation. The Canon explains “not getting what you want” as referring to cases where you’re subject to any of the other examples of suffering—such as aging, illness, and death—and want to be freed from them simply through the power of wishing or prayer (MN 141). The frustration of not being able to wish these forms of suffering away does nothing but add more suffering on top of the suffering already there. Instead, as we’ve noted, you have to focus your desires on following a course of actions that will actually bring all these forms of suffering to an end.
Up to this point, the Buddha’s explanation of suffering deals in things that are perfectly familiar. We’ve all suffered in these ways ourselves, or seen other people suffer from them. Then, however, he summarizes the suffering common to all these examples, and this is where he enters unfamiliar territory. In short, he says, the five clinging-aggregates are suffering. This, too, he says, is something we’ve all experienced, simply that we don’t understand it in these terms. Only when we understand what he’s referring to by this summary can we begin to comprehend the first noble truth.
“Aggregate” is a translation of the Pali word khandha, which means, “heap,” “group,” or “mass.” It also means the trunk of a tree—a meaning that, we’ll see, is actually relevant to this context. The five aggregates are: form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness. It’s important to note that the Canon defines the aggregates in terms of verbs—feelings feel, perceptions perceive, even form “deforms”—making the point that these aggregates are processes and activities, rather than solid things.
As for “clinging-aggregates,” this expression doesn’t mean that the aggregates cling. Instead, it refers to the act of clinging to the aggregates. In fact, the suffering lies in the clinging. The experience of the aggregates on their own, without clinging, may involve some stress, in that the aggregates continually change in dependence on conditions, but if there’s no clinging, that stress doesn’t weigh down the mind. This means that the suffering referred to in the first noble truth is the suffering of clinging. The aggregates aren’t the problem. The clinging is.
In the first noble truth, the Buddha tells us that the act of clinging to them is suffering. This is the first point where his analysis of suffering goes against the grain.
As for the Pali word for clinging, upādāna, that means (a) sustenance and (b) the act of taking sustenance—as when a tree takes sustenance from soil, or a fire from its fuel. The same meaning applies to the mind. This is where the interpretation of khandha as the trunk of a tree is relevant: We feed off the aggregates in the same way that a fire feeds off the trunk of a tree as it burns.
The implication here is that suffering comes from a double level of feeding: feeding emotionally off the activities that go into the act of feeding to ease our physical and emotional hunger. This is a second point that goes against the grain. Ordinarily, we enjoy clinging not only to our food, but also to the act of clinging itself.
To accept the Buddha’s analysis of suffering in the first noble truth, we have to develop some dispassion for the things to which we cling and for the act of clinging itself. This makes the first noble truth difficult to accept, but it’s also what makes it noble. It teaches us to step back and raise ourselves above our hungers.
We work toward this dispassion by following the duty that corresponds to this truth. Instead of running away from suffering or trying to push it away, we patiently observe it with the purpose of comprehending it. We need to see for ourselves how the suffering is not the mere fact of physical pain or stress. It’s actually identical with the act of clinging. Full comprehension comes when we understand clinging to the point where we have no more passion, aversion, or delusion around it. A first step in comprehending clinging is to identify its various types. The Buddha lists four (MN 11):
- Sensuality-clinging: passion and desire to find pleasure in fantasizing about and planning sensual pleasures.
- View-clinging: passion and desire for views about how the world is structured and how it works.
- Habit-and-practice-clinging: passion and desire for ideas that tell you how you should act in the world.
- Doctrine-of-self-clinging: passion and desire for ways of defining who or what you are.
Doctrine-of-self-clinging relates to your sense of yourself as (1) an agent, capable of controlling events in an attempt to negotiate between what should be done, based on the way the world works, and the wants of (2) the consumer who will find happiness when those wants are satisfied. Both of these senses of self are overseen by the self as (3) a commentator, who judges the actions of the agent to see if they satisfy the consumer, and to decide if the consumer should raise or lower its standards for satisfaction. These three functions of the self are your basic set of strategies for finding happiness.
The first three types of clinging define the arena in which your self acts and searches for happiness. The balance of power among the three types will vary from person to person, and—even within a particular person—from moment to moment. There are cases where people change their worldview to fit in with their desires of the moment. There are also cases where their wants run up against the shoulds and what is of a worldview to which they’re committed for other reasons. Modern psychology has detailed the suffering that comes from precisely this sort of internal conflict, one that’s not limited only to those suffering from severe mental illness. Freud, for instance, described it as the ego’s constant need to negotiate among the shoulds of the super-ego, the wants of the id, and the “what is” of the reality principle. Jung saw the issue as a clash between the shoulds and wants of the individual ego and the shoulds and wants of the unconscious. However you analyze it, this conflict is a common feature of the human condition.
However, even though the first three types of clinging define the arena in which the self functions, the Buddha identified doctrine-of-self-clinging as the most basic type of clinging of all. In fact, only in a teaching where this type of clinging is comprehended, he said, can people reach awakening. That’s because your sense of who you are explains why you’re invested in seeing the world a certain way and in believing that certain things should be done in order to attain what you want. Without your desire to gain pleasure for yourself, views of the world or of how you should act wouldn’t have much hold on the mind.
This may be why, of all the different forms of clinging, doctrine-of-self-clinging is the one on which the Buddha focused the most attention when explaining how clinging gets fixated on the five aggregates. According to him, you can identify the self either as identical with any of the aggregates, as possessing any of the aggregates, as containing any of the aggregates, or as existing within any of the aggregates (SN 22:1). For example, you might identify yourself as your body, or as the owner of your thoughts, or as an infinite consciousness containing all five aggregates, or a little person inside the body, making use of its senses. These four possibilities multiplied by five aggregates give twenty possible self-identity views to which you might cling.
So it follows that doctrine-of-self-clinging is the most important type of clinging to comprehend. And if we look carefully at the three roles of the self, we can see most clearly why clinging is suffering. The self-as-consumer, even though it enjoys feeding, is constantly hungry. As the Buddha said, even if it rained gold coins, that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy one person’s sensual desires. This means that the self-as-agent has to be constantly at work—negotiating among wants and shoulds, trying to gain a measure of control over the way things are—all in order to assuage the hunger of the consumer, with the self-as-commentator never giving it a moment’s rest. However, you can’t uproot your sense of self without also uprooting the other types of clinging as well.
These facts about suffering define the strategy of the remaining three noble truths. Suffering can’t be ended until you abandon the desires that lead to clinging: This is the message of the second truth on the origination of suffering. But those desires won’t go away simply by wishing for them to go. A first step in abandoning them requires developing an alternative set of desires, with a new sense of who you are, of how the world works, and of how you should act in response to these new views. In other words, you need to use desire and clinging in the quest to end desire and clinging. That’s the strategy of the fourth noble truth, the path to the end of suffering. Once the path has done its work, you can abandon it, too. When the mind is totally free of desire and clinging, it can realize the third noble truth: suffering’s end.
– Four Noble Truths, Chapter 5, The First Noble Truth, Ṭhanissaro Bhikkhu