The second noble truth is called the truth of the origination of suffering. The term “origination”, samudaya, means “cause”—and a particular kind of cause at that: a cause coming from events in the mind. This is the main message of this truth: The cause of suffering lies inside. You suffer, not from what comes into the mind, but from what comes out of it. Things outside—society, the climate—might be atrocious, but they’re not the real cause of your suffering. If they were, then in the quest to put an end to suffering, you’d have to make the world a perfect place. But the world resists being made perfect. As we noted in the First Noble Truth, even the highest heavens are impermanent and imperfect. Suffering could never cease.
But because the cause of suffering lies within the mind, and because the mind can be trained to be perfect in completing the duties of the four noble truths, the end of suffering is possible. When you can train the mind to abandon the causes of suffering coming from inside, nothing in any world of experience can make you suffer in any way. The Buddha identifies the origination of suffering as any craving that leads to further becoming, accompanied by passion and delight, delighting now here, now there. Let’s look at what these words mean.
The Pali word for craving, taṇhā, also means “thirst.” Just as suffering is a form of mental feeding, the cause of suffering is a form of mental thirst.
Further becoming is best understood by first getting an idea of the types of craving that lead there. All in all, there are three:
Craving for sensuality: As we noted in the First Noble Truth, “sensuality” refers not to sensual pleasures themselves, but more to the mind’s fascination with thinking about and planning them. In fact, a large part of sensual pleasure lies in the fantasies we use to embroider it: playing up pleasures we’ve had in the past as a way of inciting desire for more pleasures in the future.
Craving for becoming: Becoming (bhava) is the act of taking on a self-identity in a particular world of experience. The word “self” here can mean any sense of who you are: finite or infinite, material or formless. “World” can be either an interior thought-world or any of the outside worlds into which beings are born to pursue their desires. These becomings can exist on any of three levels: the level of sensuality, the level of form, and the level of formlessness. A becoming on the level of sensuality would include the experience of pleasures or pains of the five physical senses. A becoming on the level of form would include the experience of the form of the body as felt from within. A becoming on the formless level would include the experience of such formless dimensions as infinite space or infinite consciousness.
The mind goes through many of these becomings in the course of a day, often with a different sense of the world and sense of self in each case. This is why your sense of who you are and where you are can change so quickly.
Craving for non-becoming is the desire to see a particular becoming come to an end. This type of craving can be motivated by any number of reasons. For example, in some cases, you might want to see a becoming end because the root desire that generated it has been thwarted (as when you fall in love with someone who then calls off the relationship). In other cases, it’s because your sense of the world or of your self in that becoming has involved some unanticipated suffering (as when you marry the person you love, but the marriage turns out to be a disaster). Or it may be because another becoming has arisen in the mind around a desire that conflicts with the first becoming (as when you’re stuck in a bad marriage and fall in love with someone else). In all cases, the craving for non-becoming finds delight in its desire to escape from the becoming in which you find yourself.
These three forms of craving lead to the four forms of clinging in the following way: Craving for sensuality, of course, leads to sensuality-clinging. Craving for becoming and non-becoming lead to views about the self in the world and how it should behave in negotiating the world: the remaining three objects of clinging.
All of these three forms of craving have one feature in common: They all lead to further becoming, “further” in the sense that they lead to more states of becoming either on a purely mental level or on the physical level, creating the conditions for rebirth after the death of this body. Central in all cases is the fact of location: These forms of craving generate further becoming by delighting in an object of desire in a particular location, physical or mental. This is the meaning of the phrase, “delighting now here, now there,” in the definition of this noble truth.
The fact that craving for non-becoming also leads to becoming presents a particularly tricky challenge. Even though the Buddha encourages you to end craving for becoming, you can’t simply replace it with craving for non-becoming. If you do, you’ll cling to the desire to end becoming, and that act of clinging—it counts as view-clinging—will involve notions of “self” and “world,” leading to more becoming.
The way out of this dilemma is to look at the processes leading up to becoming—such as sensory contact, feeling, craving, and clinging—as events in and of themselves, and to develop dispassion for them before any sense of “self” or “world” can coalesce around them. The Buddha calls this approach “seeing what has come to be (bhūta) as what has come to be.” (Iti 49) In other words, you see the processes that come to be as having resulted from a series of events acting as causes. If you develop dispassion for the events, the causes will cease, and whatever has come into being based on those causes will cease as well.
In practice, this means that you can’t focus directly on becoming, and you can’t even think in terms of “self” or “world” at that stage of the meditation. Instead, you have to focus on the process of events that would lead up to those concepts, simply as events in a causal chain, with no thought of where they’re happening or who they’re happening to. They’re just events as events. This may sound fairly abstract, but the Buddha is actually asking you to look directly at events immediately present to your awareness, on a level of intimacy that lies closer to your awareness than even your sense of self in the world.
As these causes for new becomings disband through dispassion, no new becomings can form. At the same time, any becomings already existing will be allowed to cease as their causes run out. This is the only way in which becoming, and its attendant suffering, can be totally brought to an end.
The act of developing this dispassion is what abandons craving, but it starts by focusing not on craving itself, but on the locations where craving arises and settles in. In other words, you learn to see that the things in which craving delights are not really worth craving after all.
The Canon describes these locations as “whatever seems endearing and alluring in terms of the world.” You develop dispassion for them by analyzing them into discrete events related to the processes of experience at the six senses. For instance, suppose that you crave a certain person. When you see that the craving is causing suffering and you want to be free of it, you start by analyzing the allure of the craving as to where it might be focused in the internal sense media—the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and ideation—or their external objects: sights, sounds, aromas, flavors, tactile sensations, and ideas. You then further break the sensory process down into the events that surround experience at these senses (DN 22):
- contact between the senses and their objects,
- consciousness at that contact,
- feeling born of the contact,
- perceptions of the sensory objects,
- intentions for the sensory objects,
- craving for the sensory objects,
- thoughts directed at sensory objects, and
- evaluation of sensory objects
Here again, this analysis may seem abstract, but as we noted above, you’re actually moving from a mental construct—your sense of the other person—to the events directly experienced in your own awareness out of which you assemble that construct. You find that what seemed so obvious to begin with—your sense that the craving was focused on the other person—is not so obvious after all. Maybe you were attracted more to your perceptions about that person, or to the way you talked to yourself about yourself in relation to that person. That’s where the craving was really focused: on the perceptions or the thoughts and evaluations about the relationship. Your craving wasn’t really focused on the other person at all.
This is why personal relations can be so precarious. You’re not really in love with the other person. You might be in love with your intentions around that person—you might even crave your cravings—which often have very little to do with who that person really is. And because you’re not fully aware of where your cravings are actually focused, they can move around quite quickly—“now here, now there,” from perceptions to intentions to other cravings, playing hide and seek—without your even knowing it. No wonder your cravings can find it so easy to lie to you.
Seeing how craving and the objects on which it focuses are so inconstant and unreliable, you move closer to wanting to develop dispassion for any craving that would lead to further becoming. This is how you begin to fulfill the duty with regard to this noble truth. And this is where you see why this truth is noble, in that it induces you to develop a noble sense of dispassion toward your cravings.
– Four Noble Truths, Chapter 6, The Second Noble Truth, Ṭhanissaro Bhikkhu