The Truth of Unsatisfactoriness

Episode 131 of the Secular Buddhism Podcast

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 131. I'm your host, Noah Rasheta, and today I'm going to talk about the truth of unsatisfactoriness.

As always, keep in mind: you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use what you learn to be a better whatever you already are.

A Quick Note for New Listeners

If you're new to the podcast—listening perhaps for the first time or you've jumped in on these episodes recently—I want to remind you that episodes one through five contain a summary of the basics of Buddhism. You can find these by scrolling all the way back to the original first five episodes, or you can visit SecularBuddhism.com and click on "Start Here."

Also, I've received quite a few requests for suggestions on reading material and books. If you're interested in learning more about these concepts and ideas, feel free to visit SecularBuddhism.com/books, where you'll find my recommended books—ones I've read and wholeheartedly recommend for anyone interested in exploring Buddhism or these general topics and concepts I discuss on the podcast.

A Personal Update

Quick update on my own life: I recently didn't record a podcast episode last week because I've been on the road. Many of you know that I moved to Mexico for a year with my family to help my kids learn to speak Spanish and connect with the culture—since that's where I'm from. But in light of recent worldwide events and the potential social unrest and economic changes happening across the globe, my work related to online advertising (which I can do remotely) has dried up. So I had to make a decision. Rather than waiting until June to move home, we decided last week to go ahead and make the move.

Flying home wasn't the tricky part. We knew that would be easy. The tricky part—the scary part—was figuring out how to get all of our possessions home. That meant packing everything into the car and driving all of it back myself. That's exactly what I did.

So I've been off the radar for the last seven days. It took me seven days from last Wednesday. I left early in the morning and drove from essentially the southern part of Mexico all the way to the north, crossed into Texas, made my way to Dallas to visit my parents, and then journeyed westward from there. I recently made it back to Utah. That's what I've been up to. It's why I wasn't able to record a podcast episode last week. But here I am, catching up.

The Koan: What Is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Jumping right in, I want to talk a little bit about the koan that says, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" I wanted to bring this up because it's one of the classics—one of the main ones you're going to hear when you start studying or reading about Zen koans. I want to share some thoughts that came from the Patreon community.

David Spots says: "For me, the answer to this week's koan is whatever is perceived by the listener."

Nina from the community says: "This koan brings up the emptiness of things as well as interdependence. A clap is made up of non-clap elements—which when dismantled would be the fingers, the hand, the skin, the bones, the brain, the cells, et cetera. So ultimately the sound of one hand clapping is empty of sound because a clap is relative to what is perceived to be a clap." I like those thoughts from Nina.

Matthew says: "Whenever I hear this koan, I remember when they had it on The Simpsons and it opened Lisa's mind. I agree with a lot of what others said, which is interesting because before I used to try to solve the puzzle, but it is much like the saying, 'If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a noise?' It's about perception. I think it's also about things not having an intrinsic meaning. What is a clap? Is it two hands hitting each other? If so, how hard? What if I touch them ever so softly? Can one hand clap? Maybe. You can hit your palm with the fingers of the same hand. And what if you slap your thigh with your palm, like you often do at a sports event? Or if you have a drink in one hand, that is one hand clapping, and I know the noise that it makes."

I agree with all the sentiments shared in the group. It's always a fun experience to hear other people's perspectives and thoughts regarding one single topic. In this case, what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Now, for me, I feel like trying to answer is the problem. Because I could equally ask other questions, like: What is the sound of anger? If I were to ask that, you could give me an answer. You could say it's yelling, or grinding your teeth, or punching a wall with your hand. All of which could be correct, but all of which are also incomplete. Because perhaps there isn't an actual sound to anger. There are events that can arise with anger as their cause or condition.

I think with the sound of one hand clapping, you can run into similar issues because you'd have to define what clapping is. I remember in school sometimes when you had to be quiet in class but they wanted you to clap, you could lift your hands in the air and kind of rotate them back and forth like air clapping. There's no sound taking place, yet that counts as a clap. So then it forces you to define: is clapping an act of celebration—a way to let someone know that you're celebrating with them? And that counts as a clap? Is it specifically the two hands coming together? If so, what about at a sporting event where I take two long sticks (clapping sticks) and hit those together to make my clap louder? Does that not count because my hands aren't touching?

It can become problematic because I have to define what a clap is, and I'm left with this idea: what is the sound of one hand clapping? Well, the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one hand clapping. However I define it, I may be missing the point, but I will always be correct by saying that the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one hand clapping.

And now I leave it up to you to imagine what that means and interpret the meaning. That's how I like to think about this specific koan. It's an invitation—as always—to go inward and ask yourself: "What does clapping mean to me? What does the sound of one hand clapping mean to me?"

The Truth of Unsatisfactoriness

Now, jumping into the topic for this podcast episode: The Truth of Unsatisfactoriness.

I'm going to echo some sentiments I shared in Episode 122, "We Don't Eliminate Suffering," and Episode 57, "Discovering All Pervasive Suffering." The truth of unsatisfactoriness is a title we could use to talk about the first of the Noble Truths. In Buddhism, if you were to ask almost any Buddhist what the core basic Buddhist teachings are, they would probably summarize the Four Noble Truths. And the first of these is the truth of suffering—or as I like to call it, the truth of unsatisfactoriness.

Here's what we're trying to understand: the nature of reality is that difficulties will arise and we will experience suffering or unsatisfactoriness. We can begin to embrace that fact by recognizing that suffering in general is not personal. It's simply part of the experience of existence. We will experience suffering no matter how hard we try to avoid it—whether we search for a magic formula to remove it, chase after money to buy it off, seek fame to drown it out, pray, meditate, perform rituals to try to shield ourselves from it. Suffering in some form will find us.

It is the central problem of human existence. The diagnosis is universal. It's not just you. It's all of us—the rich, the famous, the powerful, the pious. Everyone. If you think you're alone with your difficulties, just spend some time talking to others and ask them about their problems. If they're open and honest, you'll soon discover that everyone has struggles, pain, and unsatisfactoriness to contend with.

What we learn from the Buddha about embracing suffering is this: life is going to be easier for us when we truly accept that suffering is a part of life for everyone. There's simply no way around it.

Acute Versus Chronic Suffering

I wanted to bring this topic up because in recent weeks, I had a discussion with a friend of mine, Matt, who brought up the concept of acute suffering versus chronic suffering. What he elaborated on was this: sometimes when we approach Buddhism and these big concepts around suffering, it seems easy to apply them to some form of acute suffering—some big change. Like you lose your job, lose a loved one, or realize you're sick. Things of that nature.

But what happens when we experience this level of unsatisfactoriness in a chronic sense? It's a lower magnitude of unsatisfactoriness, yet it's there, and we just kind of deal with it day in and day out, often for months or years, or even our whole lives.

That discussion made me think about the Buddhist concept of all-pervasive suffering. If you've read some of my books that talk about suffering, I mention various types of suffering. I think it's important to recognize and highlight that there are indeed various forms or ways to suffer. One of them is what we call all-pervasive suffering.

Keep this in mind for a second: the notion of all-pervasive suffering is essentially that there's always, at any given moment, some underlying unsatisfactoriness that's there. What we want to identify is: where does that come from?

Let me use an example. On my drive home, I spent seven days sitting in a car. My shortest days were 10-hour drives, and my longest days were 14-hour drives. Doing this day in and day out, I had a lot of thoughts about discomfort and unsatisfactoriness. It stemmed from things like my foot going numb, my legs being uncomfortable, my lower back hurting—all the discomforts that come with sitting in a car for that long.

But it got me thinking: What if I went back in time?

At some point, I would have said, "Transporting my possessions on this sled is really hard." So I invent wheels. Oh, well, that makes it a lot easier. And for a split moment, I'm grateful that it's so much easier to pull this wagon with my possessions rather than pushing it or dragging it on a sled. Then I might realize, "Oh, it was way easier when I tethered this wagon to an animal and let it pull me. Oh, I'm so grateful for that now."

And then discomforts arise from that: "Oh, I wish my animal didn't need to rest so I could keep going. I wish it could go faster. This is taking forever." Or "I'm going numb sitting on the back of this horse."

Then motors are invented and come along. "Oh well, now this is easy. I get in this vehicle and I just go." And again, "Well, it's slow." And what I'm trying to get at is this: over time, this process has become better and better and better. Why? Because we generally don't like discomfort, so we're constantly looking at ways to ease or minimize it.

Thanks to that, we've evolved to the point where here I am, taking a seven-day drive that traverses from one whole country to another. It's pretty incredible that I can do that in a car. And sure, there are difficulties that arise because that's the nature of life. There are always going to be difficulties. That's what I wanted to highlight.

Sure, I could make this better. What if I cut it from seven days down to three days? There would still be discomfort from sitting for three days. Or even one hour. We do this when we're on an airplane, right? We can be on a flight that's going to be an hour or two hours long, covering thousands of miles, and we're unsatisfied that the internet right now isn't working, or we can't watch the movies, or the screen in front of us is broken.

This is what I want to get at with the idea of all-pervasive suffering—this more chronic form of suffering that Matt was talking about.

When We Resist What Is

This is evident not just because I was taking a drive, but let's use another example. Matt and I talked about this, and the example would be: let's say you're in a job and you're not completely satisfied with it. There's an underlying level of unsatisfactoriness with your job. But here's the problem that arises: it's not actually the unsatisfactoriness itself. The problem is that we feel the unsatisfactoriness and we think that we shouldn't feel it.

It's like we've believed—I don't know where from, maybe from societal views or wherever these views came from—that if we're suffering, even a little bit, then we're doing it wrong.

I see this all the time when I receive emails asking about tips or advice about parenting through a Buddhist lens. The general vibe I get from these emails is: "Hey, parenting is pretty hard. Therefore, I must be doing it wrong. How can Buddhism help me do it right so that parenting isn't hard anymore?"

It's almost like nobody told us that parenting is hard. Somehow we all bought into this lie—which is that if you do it right, parenting is easy. And that's the problem. The problem isn't that parenting is hard. The problem is that parenting is hard and we don't want it to be hard.

So here we are, comparing—because of social media or whatever—what we think other people's parenting experience is like. We're thinking: they must be doing something right and I must be doing something wrong because if it's hard, I'm not doing it right.

And Buddhism steps in and says: "No, all-pervasive suffering is that parenting is hard. There's just no way around that. There's no escaping it."

The Restaurant Analogy

Imagine that you have a restaurant that you really enjoy, and at that restaurant there's a specific dish—a meal—that you really enjoy. So you always pick that one. Now you may have this underlying unsatisfactoriness if you start to think: "I really like this, but man, what if there's another meal at another restaurant that I might enjoy more?"

If I think that—which absolutely could be true—then yes, it's difficult to fully enjoy this meal because what if there's another meal I would enjoy more? So I want to go taste all of them. Now there's no way around this because you cannot taste every dish at every restaurant in the world. It cannot happen. It's physically impossible.

So when I recognize that, I can learn to accept that there is going to be a level of all-pervasive suffering every time I eat a meal, no matter how good it is. Because somewhere in the back of my mind might be the thought: "What if there's another meal somewhere else that I would have liked more?"

Now take that same line of thinking and correlate it to bigger things like relationships. I think this is a big deal in relationships.

You're in a relationship, and some days you're thinking, "Hmm, what if I had married this other person instead?" Someone you dated in college or high school, and you start having those similar thoughts: "What if there was a relationship out there that would be better than this one? More compatible or whatever?"

And the truth is, well, yeah, it very well could be. But here's the catch: you could be in that relationship and you'd be having the exact same thoughts: "What if I had married the other person?" There's no way around that because you can't have the experience of being in a relationship with every single person in the world. It cannot happen. It's physically impossible.

So there's always going to be that underlying all-pervasive unsatisfactoriness in every relationship. It's telling you: "What if? What if it would have been different?" Well, yeah. That's fine. So what I want to get at here is this: when these thoughts arise, or when this general underlying form of all-pervasive suffering arises, there's nothing wrong with it.

The Problem Is Not the Suffering

The only time this becomes problematic is when that arises and then we start thinking: "Oh, what does that mean? Oh no, maybe..."

Don't misunderstand me here. I'm not saying that if you're in a relationship, just stick with it—that there's no better relationship out there. That's not true. I know plenty of people who were in miserable relationships, ended up getting divorced, and found themselves in much happier and healthier relationships later.

So I'm not saying stick with things. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is this: you're never going to find the one that is perfect in the sense that you will no longer have any form of unsatisfactoriness—whether it's the meal at your restaurant, the person you're married to, the way you're parenting your children, or the job you have.

There's always going to be that "what if." And I think it takes a lot of skillfulness to decide if and when it reaches the point that you actually should do something about it.

I've done something about it in terms of my job. I wasn't happy with a job once, and I finally did something about it. I ended up in a much happier job. And I've made career changes. Even now, I feel like I'm really enjoying my job. I cannot imagine—the line of work that I do, teaching people to paraglide—I cannot imagine something more fun. And yet there is the all-pervasive thought of: "Well, what if I had become a helicopter pilot? That was my dream as a youth." Or, "What if I had become an Air Force pilot and I flew jets?" Or, "Ooh, what if I would have had the chance to become an astronaut?"

I can go down that path, and sure, it's true: what if one of those things would have been way more enjoyable than what I do? And I don't know, because I wouldn't know unless I was in those shoes. And I might be in those shoes thinking: "This is kind of stressful. I wonder what it would be like to just be a paraglider pilot or a paraglider instructor?"

So the point I want to make is this: when we identify this all-pervasive suffering—this underlying unsatisfactoriness that permeates everything—we can learn to recognize that it's perfectly okay to experience all-pervasive suffering or all-pervasive unsatisfactoriness. It only becomes problematic when we experience it and we think we're not supposed to be experiencing it.

Then we start buying into strange conceptualizations in our mind—like, "Well, if I don't like this job, I shouldn't be here." And again, I'm not saying stick with a job you don't like. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying there's a difference between identifying the all-pervasive suffering that's there versus acute suffering. Like if my boss is mean to me and I can't stand my boss, then yeah, do something about it.

Please don't misunderstand what I'm trying to get at here. I'm not saying stick with a bad relationship or with a bad job.

Judgment and Attachment

Another way to think about this came up in our conversation this morning during our live Zoom call—our community call. We were talking about the concept of judgment and how one listener mentioned that he's trying hard not to judge people.

I brought up the fact that judging people is a natural thing. We all do it, and it's because we're hardwired to do it. We have to make quick assessments to decide: Are we safe? This is an evolutionary thing where we can almost instantly say, "Is this person on team us or on team them?" We're hardwired to do that.

So what I wanted to make clear was this: there's nothing wrong with judging. It's the attachment we have to the assessment we made in our judgment that can be problematic.

For me, I catch myself judging people all the time. And when I do, I just remind myself: "Well, that doesn't mean that I'm right, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's true." I have reasons for why my judgment goes one way or the other, and that's based on my societal views, my upbringing, and all kinds of things that I cannot help. But when I realize that I'm doing it, I can remind myself that just because I thought that doesn't mean it's true.

If I were to spend time getting to know this person, I may be pleasantly surprised at how wrong I was. That has happened to me various times. It's also happened where the more I get to know them, the more confident I am in my assessment—in the judgment I had already made. I'm sure we've all experienced both of those things.

But the point here is that judgment isn't the problem. The problem is attaching to the assessment we made in the judgment and saying: "I know that I'm right, and I am definitely not wrong." That attachment can produce a lot of difficulties.

It's another thing to say: "I've judged this person, but now I'm open to see who they really are. And I'm going to spend time trying to get to know this person." That's just a whole different thing.

Self-Inflicted Suffering

So the correlation here is this: we experience suffering because the nature of life is that unsatisfactoriness arises the moment we want things to be other than how they are. The problem isn't that we suffer. The problem is that we attach ourselves to the idea that we can somehow—through a magic formula—eliminate it.

I know it sounds tricky because Buddhism proposes this as a formula, right? The Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of the causes of suffering, the truth of cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. So it would seem very clear that what we're implying is this: if you practice Buddhism hard enough and in the right way, you eliminate suffering.

And although that's what it sounds like, there's a huge caveat there. First, we've got to define what is suffering and distinguish between what is natural and what is self-inflicted. Then we realize that what we're talking about in terms of eliminating any kind of unsatisfactoriness is the self-inflicted, unnecessary unsatisfactoriness.

Because the all-pervasive—there's always going to be that underlying form of unsatisfactoriness because of the nature of reality. Because of the nature of the fact that I cannot taste all the meals at all the restaurants of the world, I will always be left with the prospect that this meal that I enjoy—no matter how much I like it—there could be another one out there that I would enjoy much more. And I'll never know, because I will never taste it.

And that, to me, is powerful. That is the truth of unsatisfactoriness.

Back to Parenting

Going back to parenting really quick: being a parent is hard. There's no way around that. The problem isn't that being a parent is hard. The problem is that we don't want to fully accept that it's hard because we somehow still believe that if it's done right, it should be easy.

And that is the problem. That is the lie. That is the mental conditioning. Parenting is hard. Being alive is hard. Having to go to work every day is hard. There's no way around that. And that is the truth of unsatisfactoriness.

Moving Forward

So I hope that these concepts and ideas help a little bit with the understanding that in life, difficulties arise. And that's not a problem. What we want to do is start understanding the causes and conditions of our unsatisfactoriness and get to know ourselves and get to the point where we understand ourselves better.

That's all I have for this podcast episode. As always, thank you for listening.

If you want to support the work I'm doing with the podcast, consider becoming a Patreon member and join our online community where we discuss these koans and podcast episodes. We have a weekly study group and live interactions with Q&A on Zoom calls every Sunday. You can learn more about the online community by visiting SecularBuddhism.com.

If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please share it with others, write a review, and give it a rating in iTunes.

And that's all I have for now, but I look forward to the next podcast episode soon.

Your Zen Koan

Before I go, here is your Zen koan to work with between now and the next podcast episode:

Elder Ting asked Lin-chi, "Master, what is the great meaning of Buddha's teachings?" Lin-chi came down from his seat, slapped Ting, and pushed him away. Ting was stunned and stood motionless. A monk nearby said, "Ting, why do you not bow?" At that moment, Ting attained great enlightenment.

That's all I have for now. Until next time.

For more about the Secular Buddhism Podcast and Noah Rasheta's work, visit SecularBuddhism.com