In my manuscript for the spiritual memoir tentatively titled From Pain to Peace: Tragedies and Violent Deaths Taught Me Wisdom and Compassion, I’ve aimed for readers from any faith tradition. Only in the last three chapters do I detail how Buddhism specifically helped me. I’m now working on an appendix for people interested in learning the basics of Buddhism.
As I answered a question that Westerners typically have about Buddhism, I realized I had expresed what, for me, is the core. Here’s the Q&A I drafted:
Isn’t Buddhism nihilistic—teaching that life is suffering?
The Buddha didn’t teach that life is suffering. He taught that suffering is an inevitable part of life. And he used a word, dukkha in Pali, that can be translated as “dissatisfaction.” He wasn’t saying that following his teachigs would do away with pain. He taught a way to stop turning the inevitable pain into angst.
The Buddfha uses a two-arrow metaphor in the Sallatha Sutta. Here’s a paraphrase:
When an ordinary person experiences painful feeling, they experience two arrows—the bodily pain itself, and the mental anguish that follows. It’s like being struck by one arrow and then immediately struck by a second arrow. But when a wise person experiences painful feeling, they feel only the first arrow—the actual physical sensation—without adding the second arrow of mental suffering on top of it.
The “bodily pain” is not only a wound but the unavoidable suffering that comes with having a body and being alive—ilness, aging, and the loss of what we love. The second arrow is our mental and emotional reaction to the first. It’s our resistance, our “why me?”, our catastrophizing, our shame about being in pain, our anxiety about the future, our rumination about the past.
I prefer not to say “enlightenment,” because it carries a lot of baggage, assorted differently among the various Buddhist traditions, but I’m clear on this:
When we learn how to remove the second arrow, we awaken to a life of joy, peace, and compassion for ourselves and others.
Nothing can be expressed fully in a sentence, but that—for me—is the essence. I didn’t understand this truth without the help of practices developed and taught after the Buddha’s lifetime, like nature-of-mind meditation, but they brought me back to the early teachings. Now I understand them in ways I hadn’t decades earlier.
I’m curious about how you might express your thoughts about the core of Buddhism. Please share them in the comments to this post. I’ll start a Substack chat on the subject as well.
While you’re at it, include what books on the basics of Buddhism you recommend for the curious. I’m adding a list to the appendix and welcome your suggestions.
And for your holiday shopping, the eBook version of A Buddhist Path to Joy is on sale everywhere until January 1 for $2.99. For your friends on Spotify or other audiobook platforms, consider giving them the self-narrated version.
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A Buddhist Path to Joy: The New Middle Way Expanded Edition by Mel Pine is available via online bookstores worldwide. The audiobook version is now available on Audible as well as Spotify and more than two dozen other outlets. You might be able to borrow it from your favorite library. The ISBN is 9798992969788.
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