Post #14: Choose Your Suffering

17 May 2023

Someone who was thinking about getting married once asked Socrates whether it was a good idea to go ahead or not. “Either way you will regret it,” the Athenian sage replied (Diogenes Laërtius, Life of Socrates 33—a theme that Kierkegaard picked up and ran with at the outset of his “ecstatic lecture” on Either/Or). The answer might be taken for a clever quip or a jest at the expense of marriage, but I don’t think so: note how regret would come from not getting married just as well. One might also object that Socrates’ qualities (and perhaps his qualifications) as a husband were not among his most obvious recommendations, but that is a debatable issue, and anyway not the salient point here.

What Socrates meant to say, as I understand it, could have been applied to almost any major decision in life: what career to pursue, whether to start a family, where to live, and so on. The point is not that there are no good choices—or at least better and worse ones—as if one could be sure of equal misery brought by nagging regrets in every direction. That’s not it, but rather that whatever one chooses is sure to bring difficulties and frustrations along with its beauties and satisfactions. So getting married may well have been the right thing for the young man to do, and a path to relative happiness for him; what it could never be, for him or for anyone, is an end to life’s problems and to dark moments when one might regret one’s choice, whatever it may be.

Problems and pains are inevitable in life, and so are recurrent dissatisfactions, if only in the form of a steady though barely discernible undercurrent of quiet unease; these manifestations of Dukkha are woven into the very fabric of life. But that is not to say that choices are unimportant or futile. Problems there will be, inescapably, but some of them will be evidently preferable to others; one might speak here, as Mark Manson does (same book and chapter that I already acknowledged in Post #8), of good versus bad problems, or perhaps less confusingly, of better and worse ones, higher-quality problems (which restaurant to go to) as against undeniably lower-quality ones (which of one’s children to feed because there is not enough to go around).

“Choose your suffering” should not be taken, then, to mean that our choices do not matter because suffering will invariably result, one way or another, but rather that we should make our decisions carefully and wisely, understanding that we are never facing the balmy prospect of agreeable consequences only, but always a motley and sometimes a repulsive hodgepodge containing a considerable admixture of unwelcome if not outright disgusting and misery-inducing ingredients.

The persistent focus on this dimension of suffering in life—Dukkha, Dukkha, and Dukkha again, as if there were nothing else—may strike the reader as irritatingly overdone and tedious, but the suspicion that it is also un-Buddhist would be misplaced. Perhaps the single most central point of orientation in the Buddhist doctrine is provided by the Four Noble Truths, and one might well be a perfectly good Buddhist grappling primarily with the first of these, that is, contemplating in all its profundity the sheer depth and profusion of the roots of dissatisfaction beneath the Tree of Life. Call this Stage-1 practice. It is not to be sneered at.

At Stage 2, combining the second and third noble truths, the reasons why suffering arises and the mechanism by which it can be made to cease, the practitioner might be engaged in a long-running experiential study of the diagnosis the Buddha provided in its many dimensions and myriad implications. Again, a perfectly credible student of the Buddha could spend much time here, at Stage 2—not so much because there is any danger of getting stuck and ceasing to progress, but more because one might get karmically detained, so to speak, with material to work through before one can move on to devote the bulk of one’s attention to something else. The choice here is not made consciously, I don’t think; the mind will go where it needs to go.

Stage 3 would involve the practitioner in accepting the Noble Eightfold Path as a suitable means for breaking the hold of Dukkha, and walking it to the best of his or her ability. Notice how, up to this point, despite persistent study and practice at all three levels and stages, we have not yet said anything about the student’s success in bringing the suffering to an end, even for a moment. That breakthrough only occurs, strictly speaking, when one experiences “cessation,” or the complete extinction of Dukkha (the literal meaning of Nibbana). Call it Stage 4 (and these are my categories only, strictly for illustration, not to be held up as in any way authoritative).

Only with such a Nibbanic dip—be it for a mere instant or for longer—does one become a stream-enterer whose progress is said to be irreversible and who only now has fully grasped the real nature of suffering, because it is only now that one truly understands the alternative, and one has known the great unburdening that is supposed to accompany it. “It is for the sake of Nibbana that the holy life is lived” (Udana 8:3). If there were no such prospect of breaking our chains at last, however remote, then our Four Truths would hardly deserve to be called noble and would perhaps have to be renamed the four bitter truths instead, and be deprived of their capitals too. Only yesterday someone told me that he understands the Teaching just this way, as a con job so far as the hopeful aspects are concerned. Perhaps, but I would take the less bleak view that overcoming suffering in such a fundamental way may be possible, and that intimations can be had even by worldlings like me, but that even a most credible practice will, until the end truly comes in sight, require much groping in the dark, though generally leading one in the right direction, let us hope. Until then, the moment of liberation, or at least its close antecedents, it remains all-important to choose as carefully as one can among one’s sufferings.

If that message does not, once again, seem quite hopeful or positive enough to sensitive ears, how about this: so long as we expect our choices to raise us out of dissatisfaction altogether (this side of stream-entry, at least), we must be continually disappointed by the bitter realization that the suffering has, yet again, caught up with us; but if we recognize from the start that whatever we decide to do, we will not be able to avoid a measure of misery, then should it not help us be a little more reconciled to our choices and their consequences alike? When they bring their share of troubles, as they must, should we not find it a little easier to smile at them and say that it would have been no different, fundamentally, with anything else we might have chosen? So go on, make your choice seriously but with a light heart, knowing that the heavy heart will come, must come, sooner or later, whichever direction you choose to go in. And with that acceptance even the heaviness of heart should be a little easier to bear.

(This one goes out to Shiva, who suggested the title in a three-minute conversation in the cold plunge poor at my neighborhood sauna.)