Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew unpacks the First Noble Truth—suffering—and its four qualifications: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, emptiness, and non-self. She opens with a striking observation: genuine practitioners welcome hardship as opportunity, unlike ordinary people who crave comfort. She explores impermanence in two modes—subtle moment-to-moment change and gross observable aging—and how recognizing this develops renunciation of saṃsāra. Drawing on a teaching story about a Thai monk’s anatomy meditation, she walks through three categories of suffering and six deeper characteristics of cyclic existence: uncertainty, greed, repeated death and rebirth, rising and falling, and fundamental aloneness. Throughout, she emphasizes that cultivating renunciation is not pessimism but freedom from the false hope that saṃsāra can provide lasting happiness. For practitioners engaged with the graduated path framework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 62 4NT 1998 11 05.mp3
UUID: 02553c02-5922-4907-85ac-2b5763a89477
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-11-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,457
Alright. Real strong Dharma practitioners, what did I say, they feel un They don’t feel happy. They get worried, they feel a bit uncomfortable when things are going too well, because they’re afraid that it might present a threat to their practice. Whereas when problems come along, when they experience pain, suffering, illnesses, hardships getting stolen from or whatever, they can say, Oh, good, this really gives me an opportunity to practice. Or when a candle blows up at them.
Spider spots them on the face, yes, whatever. Yes, you could see it as a challenge, yes. If you can keep that in mind, that will help you. My lot’s gone red, is that a problem? Will that affect the taping or whatever?
Have you got any spares? You can still hear alright, but I’m not sure whether it affects the taping before the speaker goes. Oh, alright. Then we’ll we’ll might as well keep on going till the speaker goes bang, do you think? And then we can flip the battery.
Okay then. Proof of impermanence. So the point of the truth of suffering, the noble truth of suffering, isn’t to say that we never experience happiness, or that all life is extreme misery. It’s not going around being gloomy and pessimistic and just looking on the sad side of things, but it’s pointing out that this word suffering could also be translated as unsatisfactoriness. And suffering sounds like something extremely heavy, but the Tibetan word is dug ngal, in Sanskrit it’s dukkha, and it covers the whole range, right from minor irritations, right up to really big serious crushing problems like major illnesses, like grief of losing loved ones, losing jobs, and so on.
So there’s all kinds of problems that can afflict us, And we can never be totally free from something in this range. We’re never totally perfectly happy. And even when we are happy, it doesn’t last because the nature of things is that it’s changing. So suffering has four qualifications. The noble truth of suffering has four qualifications.
The first qualification is impermanence. The second is unsatisfactoriness. The third one is emptiness. Emptiness of independent existence. The fourth is non self.
Impermanence is a big topic in itself and it’s one of the important things that we have to realize. Generally when we talk about impermanence, we talk about it in the context of the three scopes, the normal graduated path outline, and it comes into the small scope. We meditate on impermanence and on death. And we meditate on that mainly in the context of the small scope motivation or goal, which is particularly to avoid being reborn into the lower realms of suffering. So here we’re looking at impermanence again, and this topic of the four noble truths really has more to do with the medium scope.
So here you could say we’re looking at it from the medium scope viewpoint. So there are two kinds of impermanence. Does anybody want to tell us what the two kinds of impermanence are? Or you could say two levels of impermanence? The origin of hands, waves of the I thought somebody might remember.
Well, does it that when you do the mindful meditation, I think you’re getting at it. You’re thinking of subtle impermanence. Moment by moment. Yes. So it has these two levels, there’s the subtle momentary change and then there’s the coarse impermanence.
So subtle is really happening too fast for us to see it if we haven’t achieved the higher levels of meditative concentration, it’s hard to perceive, but because of the subtle impermanence we’re able to perceive gross impermanence. And we can deduce that the subtle impermanence is going on. It’s pretty obvious, and in fact science also tells us that at the atomic level there’s subtle change going on constantly. And so we also know about that from scientific studies at least as regards physical matter. And our minds, are formless, our mental elements also have this subtle change going on, and as a consequence of this we have different states of mind arising.
For instance, we can be happy one day and unhappy the next, or we can be feeling patient one day and impatient and angry the next, or so on. And these things show that the subtle momentary change must be also happening. Well, the gross is easy. We can see that all the time. It’s things like growing older, changing from day to day, you know.
One day we’re feeling well, and the next day we’re sick, and that kind of thing, this kind of thing has caused change. Very obviously. Yes, yes, the visible change, detectable change. And that comes about because of this subtle change, which changes moment to moment. So we’re sitting here, and if we’re sitting still, we might think there’s no change happening at all in our bodies and minds, but in actual fact, the whole, every atom of our body, and every facet of our mind is constantly changing, and we can’t see the change because it gets And in our bodies, for instance, our bodies seem to be the same body, but because we have this constant subtle change going on, are changing, we’re growing up, growing older, and then aging.
And so we know we started as babies, and then our bodies grew to maturity, and our bodies are growing older all the time. And we can see this growth of change happening because of the subtle change that’s going on from moment to moment. It doesn’t look as though our bodies get any older from moment to moment, but we know that this is happening. It’s not a detectable change, you can’t suddenly see all the wrinkles pop out all in a flash, and the gray hairs all suddenly pop out, it doesn’t happen like that. But we know this process is going on.
There’s a book out about when he talks to the meditation masters that are too large. And there’s one that I was doing last night, it’s so powerful in showing that. And it slows you right down to right down to intent. So even, you know, sitting there, breathing, breath out, and then intent to move and then moving and Yes, that’s one of the Theravadin practices. If you feel for instance that you want to scratch yourself or lose your position, you don’t do it immediately but you first of all watch the impulse, the determination, and then you carry out the action rather than doing it mindlessly.
Yes, so then you can see actually what’s going on in your mind because usually we do it so quickly that we have no inkling of how it came about that we just happen to scratch ourselves and relieve the itch. But if you sort of examine the itch and examine the mind that wants to scratch it and then examine the mind that tells the hand to go and scratch it. There’s quite a process going on there. Yes, well, yes. I’m not an expert on this kind of meditation, but yes, certainly if you have a sensation of pain or whatever, then one way to meditate is to use that pain as the object, and just examine it.
Anyway, we can meditate on death and impermanence here, and you know that we do the nine round meditation. And in the graduated path, that’s explained in the small scope, but all the small scope practices of course are also common to the other two scopes, so they’re important all the way through the practice. All of these practices have to be carried out by a person who’s practicing any of these scopes. But in the graduated path, the emphasis in meditating on impermanence is particularly to incite us to take refuge in the Three Jewels of refuge, and to follow the practices which are particularly designed for avoiding rebirth in the lower suffering realms, particularly the practice of observing karma. But it’s also understood that we need to do this practice of meditation on death and impermanence in order to strengthen all our practices, all our meditations.
So it also comes into the medium scope, also comes into the great scope. So here we’re looking at it from the point of view of the medium scope, which is concerned with attaining liberation. So we need this practice of meditating on impermanence to develop our renunciation of cyclic existence. And the person of this scope has to fear the suffering of the whole of cyclic existence, seeing it as being like a burning house. And no matter where you are in a burning house, whether you’re in the part that’s on fire, or whether you’re in the part that’s not on fire yet, if the house is on fire and you’re trapped within it, then you’re in a bad situation.
So the person is very set on the idea of getting out of that situation. And in that case, the person will see the pleasures of cyclic existence being like poisoned honey. They appear to be attractive, but because they just lead us into grasping at them, then they can present this danger. So the person isn’t isn’t taken in by these pleasures. If we see honey and we think it’s good honey, then we’re going to be, you know, very much attracted to it.
Particularly, I suppose that we’re in a situation where we haven’t had any sort of sweet things for a long time, like we’ve been doing a Goenka meditation course, and a couple of weeks more, we haven’t had any sweet things, so this is how it, any sugar, this is how it used to be in the old days when I was there. They didn’t have sweets and things on sale, so we had to just do without, until the decided maybe we needed to have something with a sweet taste, so they’d get some Indian brown sugar and cook us up some sort of honeycomb toffee or something, and then there’d be this incredible craving and grasping going on. Of this sort of Indian sweet, which is basically a kind of honeycomb toffee made with this incredibly of molasses y sort of brown sugar that the Indians have. It’s called guar. If you’ve been in India, you’ll know guar.
It’s not like anything we have here in Australia. So how do you avoid that in the Yes. In terms of the mind? So You know, you’ve been there and here it all is. How do you have that mind filled without grasping?
Well, the thing is to meditate in this way, just seeing it as like poisoned honey, and be mindful, see the grasping. Before this we’ve just grasped at it and not thought about it. It just seemed good, so we grasp at it, we don’t see anything wrong with that. Of course there’s nothing wrong with the But in this case, it’s poisoned honey. So that’s not because of the object itself, but it’s because it acts as the object of our grasping.
When we don’t have strong grasping, we don’t have to worry about the object. But it acts as the stimulus for our grasping, so it presents a danger to us. It presents this tendency to keep on creating cause for samsaric existence. Well basically that’s what the practitioner does. They’re so afraid of being caught up in the pleasures of cyclic existence that they practice removing themselves as much as possible from worldly things, worldly sights and sounds and impressions.
Whereas the Mahāyāna practitioner learns how to deal with these things with the thought of great compassion. Because I can’t write. Yes, well it doesn’t come all at once either. I mean, when I’m talking about the Hīnayāna practitioner, of course there are thousands of, millions of Hīnayāna practitioners who don’t separate themselves from worldly things because they don’t feel strong enough to do that, but the really serious Hīnayāna practitioner will try to do that. But isn’t that what we do on retreat?
Yes, it’s very good to do it as a part time practice, but most of us don’t have that sort of strength in us to go and do, spend our whole lives in retreat. And in fact it’s not necessarily the wisest thing to do if you’re a Mahāyāna practitioner. I think actually in a way, I think probably we might all of us at some stage in our future lives, in order to develop perfect renunciation, we might have to go through that kind of Hīnayāna practice. I’m not sure. But the Mahāyāna practitioner always, even when they do this sort of practice, they always have as their goal to come into the world and help others, whereas the Hīnayāna practitioner aims to remain away from the world and just attain liberation.
So, anyway, I’m not going to go through the meditation on death and impermanence, because we’ve done that, and I want to get on to some other topics. Gosh, it’s getting late already, I haven’t even got halfway through. And the second point is unsatisfactoriness. So, it’s not enough to just agree intellectually that life involves suffering and it’s unsatisfactory, because our instinct is to expect that things will get better or that they’re going to go on being good. So we have to do keep on doing this deep meditation.
And even when we start to get some feeling for the topic, we have to keep on developing that more and more and more until we’re like that practitioner who sees worldly things as being like poisoned honey, who doesn’t see any essence in saṃsāra pleasures. And we can give up when we can give up clinging to samsaric happiness, then we’ll be able to attain a true happiness that is really satisfying. And we have to see the difference between that true happiness and what we now perceive as being happiness, which is really another form of suffering because these worldly things can never give us true happiness. So one way of meditating on suffering is to divide suffering into three categories. We’ve been through these before, so somebody might perhaps remember this.
Well, are three categories of suffering. The one of them is suffering, isn’t it? Mhmm, right. Mhmm, suffering of change. And what’s do you remember the third one?
Pervading suffering, or here it’s translated as suffering of extensiveness. So the suffering of suffering, you know what that is, it’s called suffering of misery, but in Tibetan it’s in both cases, so it sounds a bit funny suffering of suffering, but that is literal translation. So do you know what that is? Yes, basically it’s anything that we perceive in normal terms as being suffering, such as being burnt with hot wax, or losing a job, or losing your girlfriend or boyfriend, or having somebody say unpleasant things to you. All of these things, you know, or being sick, know, whatever.
We consider all of these things as being real suffering. Everybody accepts it as being suffering. We understand this feeling as being suffering, and that’s what we normally mean by suffering or pain or misery. So the second one is suffering of change, and this is brought about by impermanence. Whatever situation we’re in, we experience change, it always changes.
So what we might be experiencing as a suffering situation will then change. For instance, we might have an itch and then we scratch it, Or we feel, this is a classic example, we feel hot, so we might be in the sun and we feel hot, so we come into the shade and then we feel cooler. We experience this as a pleasure. On a hot day we feel hot and we fan ourselves, so we have a nice cool drink. Or it’s cold and our toes are freezing, so we come in by a warm fire.
And when we start to soar out, then we feel all the pleasure of it. So we call this pleasure, but it’s really the suffering of change. And in actual fact, we keep on drinking cold drinks, no matter how pleasant they are, then we’ll start to feel sick after a while. If we start to, if we keep on staying up too long in the sun, if we stay too long in the shade, then we might start to feel too cold, so we have to go back out into the sun again. Or, you know, if we keep on scratching that itch, then pretty soon we’ll start to bleed and feel sore.
So this shows that there’s nothing truly inherently pleasurable or happy that experience. Permanently or inherently. It has the seed of suffering in it right from the start. So what’s the mindful way, like you’re hot, okay, you’re aware of that, is it not to rush to relieve it or? Oh, you can do that.
If you put your hand in the fire and it starts to burn, you should immediately rush to take it out, you know. Well, just look at the nature of that pleasure. When you come into the coolness, you’ll feel cool and you’ll think, oh how lovely. But look at it as having no essence in it. Yeah, okay.
Thank you that they feel great. It’s impermanent. It’s impermanent. It’s a result of your positive karma, and it’s the pleasure won’t last because you’ll probably start to feel too cold after a while, or in any case you’ll start to feel restless and to go and do something else. Just notice it.
Just be aware of that. See that impermanence about it. So, the third one is the suffering of Extensiveness. That’s to do with our body being like a magnet for suffering. As long as we have our bodies, they’re going to act as a magnet for suffering.
And they say that this suffering of extensiveness is very very subtle. So we’re very aware of suffering of suffering when it occurs. We don’t need to have that pointed out to us very much. Suffering of change is easy enough to perceive as suffering when we think about it. It’s something that we can understand through reasoning.
But suffering of extensiveness is very hard to see as ordinary beings. Say that ārya beings are very, very aware of this. They say that for them it’s like, for us, suffering of extensiveness is like having a hair on the palm of your hand, it doesn’t bother you. But you hardly notice it, but for Ārya beings, the suffering of extensiveness is like having a hair in the eye. It’s bothering them all the time.
So they become so aware of it that they’re constantly motivated to work for liberation. Yes. Well it’s not meaning gross in that sense, but coarse perhaps might be a better word, but it’s something that’s perceptible. So there are subtler and subtler levels of consciousness and these can only really be attained through deeper meditations, through attaining single pointed concentration. But even on the ordinary level we become more aware, our perception becomes more fine tuned as we practice Dharma and think about these topics.
So, another way to meditate on suffering can be to meditate on the eight kinds of suffering and the six kinds of suffering. We actually mentioned the eight kinds when I was reading through Buddha’s words, the discourse, and we’ve also been through those before. Those are the four that involve sickness, aging, death and the other things. Birth, sickness, aging and death and the other points. And then another way of meditating on the six kinds of suffering are experienced, which are experienced by all samsaric beings.
And so if we meditate in this way, it helps us to cultivate renunciation to the whole of cyclic existence. The eight sufferings are particularly relevant to human beings and the six sufferings are experienced by all samsaric beings. So by going through these and meditating on them, can cultivate in ourselves this thought that we really just have to get out of cyclic existence. So there’s the qualifications of cyclic existence, which is uncertainty. The uncertainty of cyclic existence.
There’s absolutely nothing fixed in cyclic existence. Nothing can be guaranteed. There’s nothing sure, there’s nothing that’s going to remain the same, there’s nothing that isn’t going to change and we can’t say how it’s going to change what it’s going to change to. So there’s nothing that we can rely on, there’s nothing reliable. And this is a cause of suffering because we can’t ever feel secure, can’t ever feel sure of our situation.
Once Lama was over teaching on this topic and he said, Do Westerners say that there’s anything certain in life? And someone said death and taxes. So somebody wrote a little comment into the paper the other day, bringing up Kerry Packer again, it looks like the Packer family now have managed to escape both death and taxes. Back money for his generosity? I think he does give a lot of charity, yes.
He’s got a hundred old. He’s got a hundred years old. Oh, cool. So if he if he manages to come back as a human being next time, he can expect to be a millionaire again. Really?
The something like that, doesn’t he? Well, yes. He’s given a lot of generosity. Of course, he he I don’t know what how he’s dodging tax taxes works. So that that’s, you know, a bit dodgy.
I’m very welcome. Anyway, we’ll leave for old Carrie Packer alone. We’ll just wish him the best. Anyway, the point is that there is this uncertainty. This is one of the six points, and it’s one of the major ones, of course.
Because we can’t guarantee anything, we’re always insecure, we’re always trying to fix things up for ourselves and arrange things so that they’ll be the way we want them, but we know all along that we can’t. And in fact, the more we rely on the way we’ve managed to manipulate the situation and arrange the situation, the more upset we’re going to be if things do go wrong. Second one is greed. So we might not think of greed as being a suffering, but it is a suffering because it leads us to being never satisfied. We get good things, we often experience good things, and we grasp at them and we want more and more.
When we get the good things that we want, we’re not satisfied with that, We want more and more. If we have nice clothes, then we want to have more and more nice clothes. If we have good food, we want to experience more and more good tastes. If we go for a holiday somewhere nice, then next year we want to go for a holiday for an even better place. We’re continually wanting better and better experiences and more and more material possessions, more and more of everything.
This just in fact means that although we do experience good things, we’re not satisfied. It leads to more and more dissatisfaction. We can’t see anybody in the world who’s satisfied except people who have actually cultivated renunciation. If we’re going to look for a really happy person, we won’t be looking for the rich people, the successful people, the famous people, but we’ll be looking at people who’ve spent their lives helping others, people who’ve spent their lives practicing spiritual paths. The third thing is having to abandon the body again and again.
We not only have to die, but we’ve had to die over and over again in the past, and as long as we’re in saṃsāra, we’ll have to keep on dying in the future. Dying is a great suffering. Nobody wants to die, we all dread the thought. Generally dying involves physical sufferings, involves great mental unhappiness, having to part with our loved ones, having to part with the things that we’ve held dear in life, the things that we’ve worked for, having to leave our lives work unfinished and go off without having completed what we wanted to do, all sorts of unhappiness involved with that process. And if we think that we’ve done it again and again so many times, you can really feel sick of it.
What’s the point? What’s the point of living our lives and being attached to all these things that we have to leave behind when we die? What’s the point of putting all our energy into these things? The fourth one is taking rebirth again and again, and taking rebirth is suffering. There are different kinds of rebirths.
Of course, if we take rebirth in the suffering realms, then of course that’s suffering. Even if we take rebirth in the human realm, that’s a situation of suffering, because being in the womb for nine months, Western psychology seems to think that that’s a very blissful situation that we all want to go back to, but according to Buddhism it’s not at all comfortable that you’re feeling trapped in this very limited little space, cramped up, you know, your legs and arms, you can hardly move them. As you get bigger and bigger, gets more and more crowded. And there’s all sorts of other discomforts going on. Can be aware if mother isn’t feeling well, you can be aware if she’s feeling indigestion or something that’s going to affect you.
If your mother’s too hot, you’ll feel too hot. If she’s cold, you’ll feel too cold. If your mother’s mentally agitated, say if she’s quarreling with her husband or whatever, you’ll also feel that agitation. In actual fact, there seems to be some confirmation of this view in rebirthing and so on. People seem to report these kinds of experiences.
Then the birth process is terribly traumatic for the baby being squeezed out of this narrow space, suddenly being forced out into this world of bright lights, of harsh sensations, of loud sounds, and it’s quite shocking. And so we’ve had to do this again and again, over and over again. In order to have a human life, we have to go through this process. So although we’re not putting down human life because it’s a fantastic experience, we don’t want to go on taking even human rebirths forever because they’re full of these unpleasant experiences. And then there’s rising and falling.
This is another suffering that we have to experience, particularly in the context of cycling in saṃsāra. We go from one rebirth to another. Over the course of our past lives, we’ve gone up and down again and again. We managed to get reborn in the upper realms for a little while, only to be cast down again, and to spend tremendous amount of time, life after life, in the lower realms before we get an upper rebirth again. We get that upper rebirth and we don’t make good use that we go back down again.
Even in the course of our human lifetimes we experience this rising and falling. Many people experience ups and downs of various sorts. People seem to achieve very high status, very high wealth and position and then fall back. We see this constantly. Plenty of examples.
Look at Alan Bond. Yes. So, these things happen. And then the sixth one is being alone. And the point is that we don’t want to be alone, we want to always have friends near to us, we want to have dear ones near to us, but the big things that we experience, we really experience alone.
When we’re born, although our mother is there, although other people are around, we have to go through that trauma of being born by ourselves. We experience it by ourselves. And then we find ourselves having to go through all the ups and downs of life. Nobody can really share our problems with us, although we might have friends that can help us. Basically, we have to experience these things within our own mind stream.
And we have to experience our own karma. We have to experience it by ourselves. And then when we come to the end of our life and die, we have to die alone and go alone into the next rebirth. So basically, we have this sense of aloneness, of not really being able to have others help us through our our biggest experiences, our biggest troubles. Even though they might be around us, they can’t really share us or help us in the way they might want us want to.
And this is one of our major sufferings. So just about time to stop. So we meditate on these topics. We all have to meditate on these topics. In order to cultivate renunciation, the person of less intelligence just meditates on these topics, and the person of greater intelligence also has to meditate on the twelve links of dependent origination, which we’ve also been through in some of the talks that I’ve been giving.
So through these meditations, we can cultivate renunciation of Samsāra. And if we’re the main thing is to cultivate this strong renunciation, to generate renunciation. And this doesn’t mean to make ourselves unhappy, but it actually means to have a remedy for our unhappiness. So if we’re finding ourselves unhappy because of our situation, or if we’re worried or dissatisfied or frustrated or whatever, it’s because we haven’t developed enough renunciation of Samsāra. We’re still looking to Samsāra to provide us with our satisfaction, with our happiness that it can’t provide.
And so a person who’s meditated on these topics well and has developed a good feeling of renunciation, a good sense of renunciation, will be very calm and focused, and won’t be bothered even by really big difficulties, let alone minor ones. Of course, it takes a lot of work to achieve this state, but we can at least start to develop this quality and to feel less concerned about the minor things. And that can be a sign of progress. As we start to see minor difficulties causing us less trouble, we can start to see that we are cultivating renunciation, and we can start to understand that we can gradually also be less disturbed by even the big things. So that’s two of the qualification of suffering, and I’m not going to talk very much about the other two, which are emptiness and non self, because that would involve talking about the meaning of emptiness and non self, which will come anyway in the other in the last two noble truths, the cessation of suffering and the path.
So I’ll also mention the four wrong views concerning suffering. And these are: Thinking of the body as clean and pure. You might find that’s a bit surprising. But it’s overcoming this view of seeing the body as being a source of pleasure and seeing it as being beautiful and clean and so on, when it’s really full of all sorts of unclean things. Got quite a shock.
One of my first contacts with Buddhism was when I was travelling in India and we were told that we could learn Hatha Yoga from a Thai monk who was living in, where was it, I think was it so a couple of us went there and he used to teach Yoga, he also used to give us little discourses on Buddhism, and the first day he gave his Buddhist discourse, he brought out this chart, one of these old fashioned charts that they used to give you in the school rooms, know, that sort of showed the body and what the body was made up of, and showing sort of things like nails and lumps of fat and so on, and all the bones and so on, listing, know, we have so much iron and so much fat and so much water. Gave us this sort of discourse on what the body was really made of, and told us that we had to meditate about this. I thought, oh, you know, we don’t want to think about these things, it’s just nasty. So I don’t think it was a very tactful sort of beginning, but it is quite true, you know, and we sort of get hung up on this idea that our bodies are something that we sort of get hung up on the idea of serving our bodies, spending all this time making them beautiful and so on, and forgetting the reality of it.
This is not saying that we shouldn’t.