Buddhist Experience

Buddhist Experience

The Buddhist Theory of Unhappiness

 

It is an ancient tradition of India, first surfacing in the Upanisads, to be interested in unhappiness and the possibility of liberation from it.  Siddhartha Gautama, titled the Buddha, took this one step further, claiming that unhappiness and suffering are the basic issue for humanity, and that human efforts should be focussed on overcoming it.  He said “One thing I teach, unhappiness and the end of unhappiness”, and he laid out this project in a four point programme which became known as the Four Noble Truths.  The Buddhist theory of unhappiness begins with the first two of these, the first giving a description of unhappiness and suffering (dukkha),and the second stating its cause, and elsewhere other causes are added and a more detailed account given of how they operate.  However, it is actually difficult to find in the Buddhist texts a clear overall statement of the theory.  To arrive at that, one has to draw together scattered doctrines and draw out their meaning, and that is what I want to attempt in this article.

 

Unhappiness

 

Buddhism takes the simple view that the world contains some things that we find agreeable and which make us happy, and some things that we find disagreeable and that make us unhappy.  Accordingly the description of unhappiness in the First Noble Truth lists

1.  several examples of disagreeable physical situations we encounter in life, and

2.  a few examples of the mental states of unhappiness they cause in us.

 

Disagreeable Things

 

These are the things mentioned, picked out in bold type.  Right at the beginning of our life we experience pain at our birth – the first thing we do is cry!  Our mother also experiences pain and risks her life to bear us.  Being liable to experience pain is a feature of having a physical body.  So is the need to constantly maintain ourselves, keeping ourselves clean and having to earn money to feed and clothe and house ourselves.  We are emotional beings, at the mercy of our emotions.  We and the world we live in are subject to change – we may lose our job or our friends.  We sometimes find ourselves in a situation we don’t like, there are times when we are separated from the people and things we love, and there are many occasions when we don’t get what we want.  More seriously, we may succumb to illness or injury.  We become increasingly burdened with the restrictions and hardships of old age.  We suffer the death of loved ones, and have to endure dying ourselves.  According to the story, it was when the young Gautama witnessed old age, illness and death on the streets of India that he was spurred to dedicate his life to doing something about it.

 

Nowadays, in an effort to recast Buddhism in modern philosophical or religious terms, some people speak of dukkha in Buddhism as existential angst or spiritual emptiness.  But the original definition is clearly about the straightforward physical causes of the ordinary unhappiness of everyday life.  This is just the unhappiness we all experience at times in our life as a result of being a physical organism in a physical world.

 

Some people also anguish about how to translate ‘dukkha’, and too often chose the one word ‘suffering’.  But the definition makes clear that what is being talked about is the whole range of unhappiness caused by disagreeable things, all the way from the agony of searing pain at one extreme, through episodes of loss and hardship, down to the moment by moment petty irritations of everyday life.  The description gives a broad survey of this range of disageeable things, and I think that all other such things not actually mentioned are also implied.

 

Few of these disagreeable things can be eradicated, but many can be reduced to some extent, and this is the important part played by Buddhist ethics.  The principle underlying the Buddhist guidelines for living is that of doing what will increase happiness and welfare and reduce unhappiness and suffering.  So, it is a Buddhist value to minimise death by not killing humans or non-human animals.  Gautama urged caring for the sick, and spoke out against trade in anything harmful to health.  He was sceptical about the efficacy of much of the medicine being practised in his day, but later in Buddhist countries hospitals were established for humans and other animals.  Although poverty isn’t specifically mentioned in the list of disagreeable things, Buddhist ethics forbid trading in slaves, and specify that workers should be paid a living wage, treated well, and allowed time off.  Along with knowledge and mental training, morality is one of the three pillars of the Buddhist life, and tackles the physical causes of unhappiness and suffering.

 

States of Unhappiness

 

The remainder of the First Noble Truth gives a brief list of examples of the states of unhappiness caused in us when we experience disagreeable things.  The list is: pain, unpleasant feeling, grief, lamentation and despair.  These can be divided into two groups:

1.  feelings of pain and unpleasantness that may occur in the process of perceiving a disagreeable object, and

2.  emotional moods such as grief, lamentation and despair that may follow from such a perception.

 

1.  Painful and Unpleasant Feelings in the Perception of a Disagreeable Object

 

Buddhist psychology developed a detailed account of the perceptual process that occurs when we perceive an object.  This process is said to be composed of a series of causally linked conscious states that only last for an instant.  The object is noticed, we become conscious of it in the form of a bare sensation, it is received by the mind, then investigated, then when we have established what the object is, we respond to it, and register it in our memory.  When the object is disagreeable, feelings (vedana) of pain or unpleasantness are said to sometimes arise at specific points in this process.

 

The feeling of pain (dukkha, used here in a more limited sense) arises in our bare awareness of a tactile object of a sufficient intensity, and this is said to be the only conscious state in which pain occurs.  In other words, we feel pain when a sufficiently strong stimulus affects our tactile sense receptors, such as when we are hit or cut or burned.  Each conscious state of pain lasts for only an instant, but so long as the object continues to cause it these conscious states of pain will rapidly reoccur with each new perceptual process, giving us longer experiences of pain.  There are some yogic techniques which teach a degree of mental control over pain, and one might have expected Gautama to have taught them, but he didn’t.  Perhaps they had not yet been developed.  However, he did teach the mental control of our emotional reactions to pain.  There are also, of course, pain-killing drugs, some of which probably existed in early Buddhist India, but I’m not aware that Gautama advised using them, which is perhaps surprising.  Nevertheless, alleviating pain was the driving force of his code of morality, so he did advocate this in general terms.

 

According to the developed Buddhist psychology, the unhappy feeling of unpleasantness (domanassa) occurs only at the stage in our perception of a disagreeable object when we respond to such an object with aversion.  Unlike pain which is felt directly as part of our first consciousness of the object causing it, the mental feeling of unpleasantness can only arise when we have mentally established what the object is, which we do immediately prior to responding to it.  It is said that we are capable of some control over whether we associate a perceived disagreeable object with an unpleasant feeling, and gaining this may be part of the Buddhist mental training for removing the emotional response of aversion.

 

2.  Emotional Moods of Unhappiness

 

These are the remaining states of unhappiness listed in the First Noble Truth, the emotional moods of grief (soka), lamentation (distress) (parideva), and despair (upayasa), and we can take it that all other emotional forms of unhappiness are meant to be added to these examples.  The definition makes it clear enough that this is such unhappiness in this present life.  At no point in the definition is anything said about lives after death.  Gautama believed in rebirth, but his primary concern, as stated in the Four Noble Truths, was unhappiness and liberation from it in this present life.

 

However, when the Abhidhamma Buddhist psychology was formulated at a somewhat later date, these caused states of unhappiness appear in the account, not as occurring in this present life, but in another life after death into which one is reborn.  This is rather extraordinary.  The original central basic Buddhist project was concerned with unhappiness in this life, but the later more detailed account of it, apart from the unhappy feelings in the perceptual process, drops all mention of grief, lamentation and despair, etc., in this life, and instead talks of the unhappy perception of a disagreeable object leading, in some cases, to physical rebirth after death into a future unhappy life, in unfortunate circumstances on earth, or in one of a number of hells.

 

What seems to have happened is that the original phase of Buddhism, in which Gautama is said to have achieved liberation from unhappiness in this life, and to have led many other people, often quite ordinary people, to do the same, had come to an end.  The situation had changed to one we are familiar with today, where liberation in this life was rare indeed, and most followers of Buddhism didn’t even aspire to it, but just hoped for a happy rebirth.  The Abhidhamma Buddhist psychology seems to reflect this.  It concentrates on unhappy rebirth, and how to avoid it.

 

Nevertheless, it still owes us an account of the unhappy emotional moods such as grief, lamentation and despair, that arise in this present life and are listed in the First Noble Truth.  There is reason to believe that the Abhidhamma account of physical rebirth into other unhappy lives can also be taken as a poetical image of unhappy periods within this present life.  The wider context of Buddhism is the whole Indian tradition of liberation from the unhappiness of rebirth.  Here the rebirth that liberation is from is typically expressed in terms of physical rebirth after death.  Yet liberation from rebirth is also said to involve a mental liberation in this life which transforms one’s consciousness.  The rebirth this mental liberation is from has to be a psychological rebirth, so talk of physical rebirth also has to be taken as an image of unhappy human consciousness metamorphosing from one transient emotional state to another.  For the Abhidhamma account of physical rebirth to also have this psychological interpretation is therefore in line with the dual nature of the concept of rebirth in ancient Indian thought.  (See my article “Rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism is Also an Image of Unhappy Consciousness”).  Also some schools of Buddhism explicitly teach this interpretation.

 

The Buddhist psychology says that an unhappy perception of a disagreeable object may be immediately followed by birth into an unhappy life, which we are now interpreting as an unhappy mood in this present life.  It is said that the conscious state of the perceptual process responsible for investigating the disagreeable object so as to establish what it is, and so the state that establishes that the object is a disagreable one, reappears as the first conscious state (patisandhi) of the unhappy mood, as the conscious states (bhavanga) which fill any gaps between perceptions throughout the duration of the mood, and as the final conscious state (cuti) of the mood.  This seems to describe the way experiencing something disagreeable can put us in an unhappy mood that continues the same despite perceiving other things.

 

It is said that some of the ‘hell’ moods contain some happiness mixed in with the predominant unhappiness, a likely description of cases where an unhappy mood is enlivened by the occasional lifts in our spirits when something agreeable comes along, but not enough to bring the unhappy mood to an end.  Other ‘hell’ moods are said to be entirely unhappy, which would be a fitting description of despair or depression.

 

The different unhappy rebirth lives, interpreted as unhappy moods in this present life, do not link up neatly with the examples of such moods given or suggested in the definition of unhappiness, but there is some connection.  Two of the hot hells are hells of lamentation, making them a suitable image of this emotional state and behaviour.  The cold hells would make a telling image of despair.  Being born as a Peta, a creature consumed by unsatisfied desire, makes a perfect image of the unhappiness of the situation of not getting what we want which is listed in the definition of unhappiness.

 

The Causes of Unhappiness

 

This completes my examination of the First Noble Truth of unhappiness, and I move on now to the Second Noble Truth which states the cause of unhappiness.  This apparently simple distinction between the two isn’t quite as simple as it looks at first sight, because in fact, as we’ve seen, the First Noble Truth is also mostly given over to listing causes of unhappiness.  The causes dealt with there are for the most part external physical causes which may be reduced by ethical action but not eradicated.  What the Second Noble Truth moves on to is the mental cause of unhappiness, and this according to Buddhism (and the ancient Indian tradition) is something that can be entirely removed.

 

It is stated that the mental cause of unhappiness is desire (lobha, tanha, raga or upadana).  This may be desire for sensory things, or it can be attachment to ideas and thoughts and beliefs.  This isn’t an original idea.  Already in the Upanisads, a founding literature of  Hinduism, it was asserted that desire was a major cause of unhappiness.  As in the Upanisads, Gautama is actually saying that desire is the main mental cause of unhappiness, not that it is the only one.

 

This is because elsewhere he talked of there being two other mental causes of unhappiness: aversion and ignorance (avijja).  The latter is also not original, already presented as a cause of unhappiness in the Upanisads.  In part it means not knowing what causes unhappiness, having desires and aversions freely because you don’t realise that they are laying up future unhappiness.  As such it is really only an indirect cause of unhappiness, in that it allows the direct causes of desire and aversion to arise.

 

Gautama may have been a bit more original bringing in aversion (dosa, patigha, upanaha, kodha or vyapada) as a third fundamental cause of unhappiness.  Doing this effectively embraces all emotions, with desire being emotionally reacting for something, and aversion being reacting against something.  It is actually just desire and aversion that are the direct mental causes of unhappiness, and this means that what Gautama is really saying is that the mental cause of our unhappiness is our emotional responses.  One sometimes hears it said that Buddhism picks out ego as the cause of unhappiness, but this is not what the central Buddhist doctrine says.  Instead Buddhism takes the Behaviourist line that what causes unhappiness are our emotional reactions, both to sense objects and to thoughts.

 

The view was that in any conscious state containing desire or aversion, there is ignorance as well.  It is also the Buddhist view that you can’t have both desire and aversion in the same mental state – they are opposites so that the presence of one excludes the presence of the other.  It follows that the three causes of unhappiness actually operate as two alternative pairs.  Ignorance and desire together cause unhappiness, and ignorance and aversion together do so, although, as I have said, in each pair it is only the emotional response, of desire or aversion, which is a direct cause.

 

In somewhat later Buddhist texts more causes of unhappiness are added to these three.  This is partly because on various occasions Gautama remarked that some other mental or emotional quality would lead to unhappiness, so these had to be added to the list.  Of the three early Buddhist schools whose literature has survived, the Theravadins added eleven more causes, which are really only ten because two of them, thina and middha, both mean mental laziness.  They include envy (issa), meanness (macchariya), uncontrolled thought (uddhacca and vicikiccha), and a conceited self image (mana).  The Sarvastivadins and Yogacarins also list all of these, and in addition they both add seven more: carelessness (pramada), sloppiness (kausidya), hypocrisy (makkha), dissatisfaction (pradasa), doing harm (vihimsa), deceit (maya) and dishonesty (satheyya), and the Yogacarins tentatively add three more: forgetfulness (musitasmrtita), confusion (viksepa), and wrong judgement (asamprajna).  I can’t deal with all this extra detail in this present article, so I’ll restrict myself to the original three causes, ignorance and either desire or aversion.

 

How these mental causes of unhappiness operate is set out more thoroughly in the doctrine called paticca-samuppada.  It is presented as a list of twelve items, with each item said to be the cause of the following one.  From early in Buddhist history up to the present day it has been found bafflingly obscure, and has been given many different interpretations.  It has proved difficult to give a precise account of each link, and at the same time present the doctrine as a whole as both coherent and illuminating.

 

I think that what we have to do is to stand back, stop worrying about precise causal links, and just ascertain in general what the doctrine is about.  It is plain enough, and fairly widely agreed, that it is an elaboration of one of the pairs of main causes of unhappiness.  This is because the item at the end of the causal chain is unhappiness, represented by the phrase ‘old age and death’ (jaramarana), and among the other items on the list are the members of one pair of the main causes of it, ignorance at the beginning, and desire two thirds of the way through.  As we have already seen, it is said that where there is desire there is also ignorance, so that is why we have both causes here.  Out of desire and aversion, desire is held to be the more dominant cause, as such the one picked out in the Second Noble Truth, so that is why desire is featured here.  It is also said that if there is desire in a mental state, there cannot be aversion as well.  This explains why desire is in the list, but not aversion.  The emphasis on the list being a causal one is not, I think, because it is about causation itself, but simply because it is setting out how unhappiness is caused.

 

Let me now give an exposition of what the paticca-samuppada might be telling us about the main causes of unhappiness.  In order to do that it is necessary to relate the bare list of items with what is said about them elsewhere in the ancient Buddhist texts.

 

I believe the first three items on the list give an account of how ignorance (avijja), the first item, indirectly causes unhappiness.  Ignorance, in this context, is not knowing what causes unhappiness, (i.e desire and aversion), and these are mental components (cetasika) of conscious states.  The second item in the list, sankhara, is a general term for the mental components, including new components as they were added to Buddhist psychology, but originally referring in particular to the karmic or unhappiness- and happiness-causing components, and in this context referring to just the unhappiness-causing ones.  Because we do not know that these components will cause later unhappiness, we allow them to arise unchecked.  The mental components are constituents of conscious states (vinnana, the third item on the list).  They are responsible for making the conscious state they are in the kind of conscious state it is.  In the Theravada school of early Buddhism in due course eighty nine different kinds of conscious state (citta) were distinguished.  An unhappiness-causing mental component in a conscious state makes it an unhappiness-causing conscious state.  More to the point, unhappiness-causing mental components cause later unhappy conscious states.

 

The next six items present the view, central to Buddhist psychology, and widespread in ancient Indian thought, that desire arises at a particular stage in the process of perception.  Our unhappy, and all other, conscious states are found in association with our physical body, together constituting us as a sentient or perceiving organism (nama rupa, item number four).  The relevant part of our physical body is the five sense receptors, and the physical organ of mind, then thought by some to be the heart, but now known to be the brain.  These six (salayatana) are item number five.  Sense objects make contact (phassa, the sixth item) with these sense receptors and the mind organ to produce sense consciousness.  A similar process occurs in the case of mental objects (thoughts), the mind organ, and mental consciousness.  Where the sense object is an agreeable one, it may in the consciousness of it be accompanied by a feeling (vedana, the seventh item) of pleasure.  At the responding stage (javana) of the perceptual or mental process we may, due to our ignorance of its effect, respond to such a pleasurable perceived object with the emotion of desire (tanha, item number eight).  Repeated desire for a particular object causes habitual entrenched emotional attachment to it (upadana, item number nine).

 

This causes our normal unliberated everyday consciousness of life (bhava, item number ten), which is depicted pictorially in Buddhism in the Wheel of Life (bhavacakra).  This image has the three main causes of unhappiness, ignorance, desire and aversion, in the central hub, and the twelve items of the paticca-samuppada around the outer rim, and between them, where the spokes would be, the various ‘rebirth states’ which we are here interpreting psychologically as the different moods and circumstances of our life.  We find ourself born (jati, item eleven) into these different phases and moods, some happy with agreeable objects, some unhappy with disagreeable objects.  When disagreeable situations arise, such as old age and death (jaramarana, the twelth and final item) we are cast into unhappy moods.  Taken as a whole, this is the more fully developed Buddhist account of how unhappiness is caused.

 

But it leaves some details to be filled in, which is done in the Abhidhamma Buddhist psychology.  Here it is said that there will typically be a gap of time between the desire or aversion, and the unhappiness it causes.  What operates across this interlude is karma, which in this case is mental karma  in this present life.  To our modern eyes it looks a lot like the emotional response of desire or aversion as neural activity that causes a physical modification of the brain.

 

In the case of desire, what Buddhist psychology says is that past desire for an agreeable object influences our present perception of a disagreeable object, specifically our initial consciousness of it (vinnana), our receiving of it into our mind (sampaticchana), and our investigating of it to establish what object it is (santirana), and this may result in our being put into an unhappy mood.  Since the object we responded to with desire was agreeable, and the object we are perceiving now is disagreeable, it cannot be one and the same object reappearing unchanged.  But it could be the same object altered.  For example, if we have become attached to a beautiful possession, then if we now discover that thing broken it will have become a disagreeable object, and our perception of it will contrast how it is now with how it used to be making us all the more upset, and the more attached we were to it in the past, the more distraught we are going to be now.  It is interesting to see that here desire and impermanence are working together to produce unhappiness.  A different case of desire causing unhappiness is where we want something desireable, but face the frustrating situation of not being able to have it.  Wanting it strongly colours our view of not having it, and the more we want it, the more inconsolable we are.  Yet another case is being attached to being surrounded by beautiful things.  If we now find ourself somewhere ugly, our past attachment to beauty will give us a very negative attitude towards the ugliness and make us feel depressed.

 

In the case of aversion, past dislike of a disagreeable object or person influences our present perception of something disagreeable and puts us in a bad mood.  If it is the same object, for example the same person, then reacting against him in the past will cause us to view him negatively when we meet him again, making our heart sink.  If the two objects are different, then it will be our general tendency to react to unpleasant things adversely that will make us sensitive to any unpleasant thing we experience and liable to be cast into a bad mood by it.  Interestingly, unlike desire, aversion and impermanence work against each other.  If a disagreeable object changes into an agreeable one, that changes unhappiness into happiness!  This could be one reason why aversion is seen in Buddhism as a lesser cause of unhappiness than desire.

 

The Buddhist solution to all this is that we must train ourself not to react to things emotionally, so ridding ourself of moods, enjoying the good times without attachment or elation, and enduring unpleasant circumstances without aversion or ill humour.

 

 

Conclusion

 

We have found that the definition or description of unhappiness in the First Noble Truth gives two sets of examples, instances of disagreeable mostly external physical objects and situations, and examples of some of the states of unhappiness they cause.  These instances of unhappy states can themselves be divided into painful and unpleasant feelings that may arise in the perception of a disagreeable object, and unhappy emotional moods that may follow from such a perception.

 

As for the Second Noble Truth, we have found that this gives what in the Buddhist view is the main mental cause of unhappiness, but that there are also other mental causes in the Buddhist literature, such as ignorance and aversion.  The two direct causes are desire and aversion, which effectively stand for all emotional responses.  How desire causes unhappiness in the process of perception is set out in more detail in the paticca-samuppada doctrine, and in more detail still, for both desire and aversion, in the Abhidhamma psychology.  At first sight it can seem difficult to extract from the early Buddhist texts a clear statement of exactly how unhappiness is caused, but I hope I have shown that it is possible to piece together something like a coherent Buddhist theory of unhappiness.

 

 

About the Author

Back in the 1970s Gerald Dupre wrote a series of articles on Buddhism and Science for The Middle Way, journal of the Buddhist Society in London, which were reprinted in a book of essays, and also translated into German. In the 1980s he was founder chairperson of the Scientific Buddhist Association and major contributor to its magazine The Western Buddhist, dedicated to setting out core Buddhist doctrines in clear language, as well as beginning to present Buddhist mental training in easy steps. He then moved away from Buddhism, studying philosophy at London University, and continuing studies in this area and that of consciousness for a dozen years. He has retained a great admiration for the ideas of the Buddha, and is now writing new, and, he hopes, more philosophically acute articles on this subject.

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