The Bible and the second "Noble Truth"
The cause of dukkha
Read Part 1: “The Bible and the first ‘Noble Truth’”
“And this, monks, is the noble truth of the origination of dukkha: the craving that makes for further becoming — accompanied by passion & delight, relishing now here & now there — i.e., craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming.”1
The cause of the dukkha that inflicts us is our craving or desire. We want to have things we cannot have, and so we suffer. This causes not only suffering or dissatisfaction in this life, but also the phenomenon of rebirth, whereby we are locked into a cyclical existence marked by dukkha.
As for this craving, its root is ignorance. As Steve Hagen explains:
It’s imperative to recognize that our dissatisfaction originates within us. It arises out of our own ignorance, out of our blindness to what our situation actually is, out of our wanting Reality to be something other than what it is.2
This link between ignorance and suffering is not foreign to the biblical worldview. God exclaims through the prophet Hosea: “My people perish for lack of knowledge (Hos 4:6).” It's true that our misconceptions of the world hurt us. We have a thirst that we seek to satisfy in a host of idols, none of which can quench our thirst. And the Buddhist is right to reject these idols to which the human heart naturally turns:
What would answer the hollow ache of the heart? Money? Fame? Sex? Learning? Power? Life in the fast lane? Life in the slow lane? Luxury apartments in Paris and Manhattan? A quiet cottage by a running brook? Perhaps you can sense already that none of these specifics will do the trick. Indeed, whatever object we pick can at best only temporarily still some particular yearning. The underlying ache of the heart remains omnipresent and unquenchable.3
According to Buddhism, the reason we act as we do is because we are ignorant of the nature of reality.
Individuality
The most important aspect of this human ignorance is ignorance of our own nature. Each of us believes that he is an individual with an existence of his own, but this impression of an individual existence is denied in Buddhism. According to Hagen, “We tend to think of ourselves as persons or individuals—separate entities persisting through time. But we aren’t. What we call a person, the Buddha referred to simply as ‘stream’.”4 This understanding is an aspect of the doctrine of “dependent origination” or “conditioned co-arising.” In the words of the Buddha: “When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. When this isn’t, that isn’t. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.”5 The idea, then, is that everything that exists is in a great stream of cause and effect, where all is transient and impermanent. People have no fixed identity because they are always in the process of becoming, always the momentary result of upstream causes, always in the process of giving way to downstream reality. The human intuition of being an individual that endures in time is therefore erroneous and a source of dukkha. According to Hagen, “It’s by holding onto this notion of self—and we hold it most dear—that we live in defiance of Reality. This is the means by which we suffer, and suffer greatly. It hurts to defy Reality.”6
This teaching is so counter-intuitive that human language cannot even accommodate it.7 It's not self-evident, but rather a logical consequence of a conception of the universe without a transcendent God. When the Stream encompasses all of reality, there is no point of reference for individual people. But the transcendent God who is outside the Stream doesn't change, and he is the fixed reference point for all his creatures. He can choose to create people, and he gives them a stable identity that doesn’t depend on their constantly changing nature. It is the fact that the Transcendent is a personal God that grounds the individualized existence of other persons.
Transcendance
This Buddhist understanding of human existence has its origins in the Buddha's response to a philosophical debate of the time on the existence of the eternal soul (ātman). The Buddha's triumph was to see that the correct answer was neither “yes” nor “no”. His approach is called the “Middle Way”, and it refuses to cling to the “extremes” of human conceptions, “frozen views”, of reality.8
This idea of the Middle Way is a constant thread running through Buddhist teaching, even to the point of asserting a Middle Way between existence and non-existence.9 There's this desire to transcend the categories of our experience in this world, this intuition that truth is greater and more multifaceted than our human concepts. According to Hagen, “The world of experience simply isn’t frozen. Reality won’t be condensed into concepts.”10
This is where the absence of God really makes itself felt in the Buddhist worldview. There’s this search for the transcendent, which can never be found, because the starting point is the non-existence of the one who is the Transcendent. Where God should be, there is a blank spot on the map that can only be defined by what it isn’t. So, for example, the description of nirvana offered by the Buddha is entirely negative, a list of everything that nirvana isn’t:
Monks, there exists that sphere where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither the sphere of infinite space, nor infinite consciousness, nor the sphere of no-thingness, nor the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; neither this world nor the other world, nor both sun and moon. And there, monks, I speak neither of coming nor of going, nor of staying, nor of falling away, nor of arising [in a new rebirth]; it is really unsupported, lacking in continued temporal existence, and objectless (Ud. 80-1).11
Transcendence can never be found because the absence of the Creator God entails the absence of the distinction between Creator and creatures, which is what really defines transcendence Not knowing the God who is the fountainhead of existence, the Buddhist correction for human ignorance ends up being just another form of ignorance.
Original Sin
By losing sight of the distinction between Creator and creature, Buddhism also loses sight of the separation between the holy God and his sinful creatures. This is the fundamental flaw in the Second Noble Truth: ignorance, which is a source of suffering, does not suffice as an explanation of the human condition. For one thing, ignorance itself needs some explanation. Where does this ignorance come from? Why do people tend to see things wrong? How did our vision get to be so corrupted? Secondly, and more importantly, there is another, deeper reason for suffering. It's just not possible to reduce all of the wickedness in human history to simple ignorance. Where does hatred come from? Where does the pleasure of hurting others come from? What explains the perversity of the human heart?
The Bible reveals what's missing from the Second Noble Truth: the concept of rebellion. Man was created for God, to find fulfillment in a relationship with his Creator, but because the first man rebelled against the Creator, human nature became corrupted to run away from the God who we still long for. It’s this corruption of the heart that is at the root of human wickedness, and it is enmity towards God that causes people to seek idols in an attempt to quench their thirst for God.
As long as the rupture between God and man is not taken into account, as long as we fail to recognize that the thirst we have is for God, we will not be able to understand the cause of dukkha. For this reason, the doctrine of original sin incorporates and surpasses the Buddhist doctrine of the cause of dukkha.
Read part 3:
“Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion” (SN 56.11), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.than.html.
Steven Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple. The Practice of Being Aware Right Now, Every Day, New York, Tuttle, 2011, p. 21.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 52.
“Assutavā Sutta: Uninstructed (1)” (SN 12.61), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.061.than.html.
Steven Hagen, op. cit., p. 139.
As Hagen admits: Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 131–136.
Tricycle, « What Is the Middle Way? », Buddhism for Beginners, https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/middle-way/.
Steven Hagen, op. cit., p. 136.
Peter Harvey, Buddhism and Monotheism, Cambridge Elements: Religion and Monotheism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 36.