The First Noble Truth: Linking Personal Suffering with Ultimate Compassion
To generate in your heart genuine motivation to follow your path to full fruition, meaning buddhahood, you must first understand the universal human dilemma that the historical Buddha of our age, Siddhārtha Gautama, came to understand.
Suffering and Confused Compassion
Most famous is the Buddha’s journey’s culmination, when he sat beneath the sacred fig tree in Bodh Gaya two and a half millennia ago and resolved to hold his ground until he had liberated himself from that dilemma. But the Buddha’s skillful resolve began years earlier, where his journey to that moment did: with his own initiation into suffering born of witnessing its universality.
The Buddha’s motivating personal anguish over the human condition was a kind of compassion, but it first manifested in a confused, personal form. Gradually, he came into the understandings that revised that kind of compassion, until he awoke completely from that confusion and began teaching others how to do so. How his motivation persisted yet changed conveys lessons about the nature of personal suffering, the nature of compassion, and the way the two are entwined yet distinct.
These understandings informed the Buddha’s first teaching, the First Noble Truth, which is that suffering is to be known. This truth exceeds the observation that suffering happens to us all. It requires a profound, more gradual awakening to the understanding that, for suffering to be transcended, suffering must first be faced unflinchingly—with zero bypassing, zero self-deception, zero revision of its bare facticity. It must be felt.
For most of us, bringing the interconnection of suffering and compassion into liberating clarity likewise happens gradually. Paradoxically, understanding suffering and compassion as one requires that we first understand them as distinct. Moreover, it requires that we apply compassion when faced with suffering, as though they were opposites.
Laps around the Spiral
This gradual path proceeds as “laps” around a spiral of returning issues, not as a linear progression from unique insight to unique insight. In other words, throughout this gradual awakening you will keep encountering your own psychoemotional issues, your “favorite” flavors and mechanisms of suffering, and your same old stubborn blind spots, again and again. Every time you work through the encounter, you will seem to have finally put an issue to rest—until its next surprise reemergence.
Now you know to expect this spiral, so now you can cultivate the patience that fuels perseverance, which is necessary. But you can also cultivate confidence by increasingly recognizing that each encounter of a repeated issue yields insights more refined than the last encounter did. Although thematically alike, each circuit of understanding burns clearer than the last. Each approaches closer to the most unconscious depth of your original wound. The repeated baring of this wound is in truth not a vicious circle, but an evolving one—a spiral.
Toward Ultimate (Uncultivated) Compassion
Fundamentally, your wending your way around the spiral will progressively reveal the interdependence of the First Noble Truth of suffering and the realization—as well as actualization—of ultimate compassion, which is not cultivated. The intuited oneness of suffering and loving compassion not only motivates your path from its beginning, but also clarifies itself as the path’s fruit.
Compassion is both transcendent and vulnerable, at once heroic and humble. It is a love whose exaltation is your own heartbreak. Realizing this first truth means realizing that no awakened awareness that liberates us transcends feeling. In the humble beginning is a transcendent end; in that end, always the humble beginning. Compassion is love tinged with sadness, even when it is the ultimate, liberating kind.
All these restatements of supreme paradox sound irreducible because they are. At their core, if you think about it a few moments, you will discern that they drive time and timelessness into each other. From our currently limited perspective in historical time, the good news is that between primordial buddha-nature and eventual buddhahood there is path. Stories are uniquely good at conveying the mutuality of time and the liberating view of timelessness.
Spiral into Linear Narrative
The Buddha’s personal journey naturally provides a useful story, one that unfolds the compact paradoxical trope of spiral path into straightforwardly linear narrative time.
As the legend goes, the Buddha was originally a confused human being named Siddhārtha. Siddhārtha was born a wealthy prince whose father kept him sheltered in the clan’s palaces. Every pleasure was within the prince’s call; every horror, beyond the perimeter. It is written that the king shielded the prince from spiritual teachings, perhaps because the existence of the teachings implied the existence of a need for something beyond material providence and paternalistic protective shelters against the truth of suffering.
One day when Prince Siddhārtha was a married 29-year-old father, he exited the palace to meet his subjects. Despite all his father’s past efforts to protect him from distress, on the road outside his luxurious confines, the prince suffered shock at the sight of a man who had grown old. When the prince’s charioteer explained to him that all human beings succumb to old age, the prince determined to venture further beyond the palace to survey more of reality.
During his subsequent trips outside the palace, he encountered in turn a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and a religious ascetic. Distressed by the successive sights of human vulnerability and desperation, Siddhārtha renounced his isolated and privileged life as a wealthy ruler. He left his young family behind, and, ironically, took up the lifestyle of the religious ascetic.
In retrospect, it is no thematic accident that the initial ascetic that Siddhārtha saw is grouped in the story with the other unredeemed human sufferers that made the ascetic seem necessary.
Prince Siddhārtha reasoned that as a wandering renunciate he could discover how to overcome suffering by transcending the perils and pains of the body. Ultimately, after about five years on this well-intentioned path of subordinating the body to brutal tests, Prince Siddhārtha finally discerned that this model of forceful renunciation and transcendence was itself just another source of dissatisfaction.
The prince-turned-ascetic therefore contemplated and revised his understanding of his original motivation, which was an equally forcefully cultivated compassion. He rejected as method the renunciation of reasonable comfort and sustenance. He stopped cultivating pains under which to test the steel of his personal transcendence. He settled instead into dispassion toward all vicissitudes.
This radical acceptance in the face of both circumstantial extremes, a view later known as the middle way, enabled the prince’s mind to settle into its calm naturally. This natural inner quiescence meant, too, that the entire fluxing field of reality became still and stable as a single continuum despite its continually changing content specifics.
Having quieted his mind and steadied himself against distraction, the prince contemplated what remained to be clarified: his original compassion for himself and all beings. He found that the end he had so long sought was in his beginning motivation. In other words, it was in compassion, although that beginning originally took the confused but temporarily necessary form of seeking rather than accepting.
Compassion for all beings, including himself, was realized by Siddhārtha as the only skillful means for resolving the dilemma of universal and personal human suffering. With this insight, Siddhārtha sat under the bodhi tree, resolute in meditation for three watches, vowing not to rise from that ground until he was liberated from the otherwise ceaseless cycles of desire, aversion, and unconscious defense mechanisms against perceived loss.
So he sat. He remained there under the tree, unshaken even by the eventual appearance before him of Māra, the diva of the sensuous realm. Māra tried to tempt him with bardo-like visions of women who represented the lust, hesitation, and fear infusing all seeking of the other or the otherwise.
Māra, backed by this army of “Māra’s daughters,” sneered down at the undeterred Siddhārtha. Māra continued: “You claim you can awaken beyond the reach of these figures who back me, but tell me—who is backing you, and why should I or anyone believe that your liberation is real?” For answer, Siddhārtha remained quiet, and with his fingertips he touched the ground that supported him.
And so it was: Against the whole of Earth invoked as Siddhārtha’s witness, Māra’s parade of attractions had no pull. Māra’s entire store of temptations to lust, power, and wealth dissolved in turn under Prince Siddhārtha’s simple gesture of intimacy with the bare ground supporting and filling his being. The visionary ruse of unwholesome revolving objects of desire proved no match for that simplicity, immediacy, and clarity.
And so it was that, conversely, aversion had no push: Before the moment of liberation the next morning, Siddhārtha ended his renunciation of the body by breakfasting on a bowl of grain. With that meal, the veil of ignorance dissolved. Having therefore penetrated all conditions and attained equanimity in the face of all polarities, all extremes, all circumstances, Siddhārtha was Buddha, the one who had awakened from samsara, from the cyclic perpetuity of suffering.
Becoming into Being, Being into Becoming
A buddha is one who has “woken up” from fundamental unconsciousness, from compulsively grasping at means, from craving an answer beyond the bare here-and-now exactly as it is. A buddha is one who has liberated himself or herself into a timeless transcendence made of the once confusedly cultivated compassion that initially motivates seeking.
Suffering, rightly understood, is a wish for happiness. It is in knowing suffering directly, without either evasion or cultivation, that we are delivered from its initial meaning as a drive. We are delivered into the liberating recognition of total compassion that is always already here. In time, in increasingly conscious cyclic reencounters with suffering, is ultimately recognized liberating wisdom.
Put another way, with liberating wisdom dawns compassion that is ultimate—that is automatic, immediate, whole, and therefore beyond and “before” all timebound need to cultivate anything at all, to escape anything at all.
In Bodh Gaya, Shakymuni Buddha sat, a human being whose body needed food cultivated in the same earth that had supported him from the beginning to the end of his path through all manner of hindrance, distraction, and misdirection. He had realized that to transcend the perils of the flesh required descent into the body and, finally, into the community of ordinary men and women who were to follow him in this realization.
Ultimate—that is, uncultivated—compassion, it turns out, emerges directly with its motivating suffering. The gradual, self-refining understanding of this paradox is aptly named the First Noble Truth. It is the Buddha’s first teaching.
To continue learning about suffering, next read the two-post series about the Three Sufferings. First read about Ordinary Suffering, and then read about Fundamental Suffering.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.