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Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: The Nature of Suffering – Addiction and the Four Truths - Kevin Griffin

The following talk was given by Kevin Griffin at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on December 08, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: The Nature of Suffering – Addiction and the Four Truths

I took for my topic this morning the foundational Buddhist teaching on the Four Noble Truths, particularly drawing directly from the sutta where that teaching is introduced. In Buddhist mythology, it is said to be the first teaching that the Buddha gave. It connects to every aspect of our lives, but particularly in terms of the topics here: chaplaincy being a position of caretaking for those who are suffering, and for my typical audience, addiction also being a suffering-based and clinging-based problem. It addresses those things so directly, so wisely, and so deeply that after decades of practicing and studying Dharma, I never tire of exploring the sutta and the teaching itself.

As I sometimes do when I am about to teach something, I went to the website last night to see what I said I was going to teach today. I knew the general topic, but I wanted to read the description. I used the Pali term Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta¹. That is a Pali term that I have practiced being able to say because I love saying Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. If you get a kick out of saying odd Pali terms, it's a good one. It is translated as "Setting the Wheel of Dharma in Motion."

The idea of a wheel is a very popular and common one in the Buddhist world and Buddhist iconography. The reason it shows up, apparently—from some of the teachings I've heard from experts—is that the idea of a wheel was considered a symbol for power in the time of the Buddha. One of the terms you see in the suttas is a "Wheel-Turning Monarch," which is like a king or queen of the world. It is interesting that "setting in motion the wheel of Dharma" is implying that there is something very powerful about this.

To frame the sutta itself, the way the teaching is delivered is not in the linear fashion we would sort of expect if you were getting a Dharma talk today from a Western teacher. It starts with this idea of a Middle Way before saying anything else. The Buddha says there is this Middle Way. First of all, just from a recovery and addiction perspective, this is a critical idea: not to go to extremes of pleasure-seeking or self-mortification (self-harm), as the Buddha says.

In the recovery world, this simple idea is to just live a more ordinary life. Not to go to extremes, not to seek out the highs or fall into the depths of despair and self-hatred, but to try to just maintain balance. So even before we get introduced to these foundational teachings of the Truths and about suffering, the Buddha puts out this idea. It is a helpful goal to keep in mind because it is so simple. When we get into the Truths and the Eightfold Path, there is a lot to absorb. But if we have these simple ideas to come back to—"Wait, am I overdoing it here? Am I expecting too much?"—it helps.

We see this in the Buddhist world. "I need to go on longer and longer retreats. I need to meditate more because that's going to fix me." I see addictive impulses showing up even in apparently wholesome settings where people are striving for samādhi² and the experiences of pleasure and highs that people can get from retreats. So, this idea of balance is a critical one.

I'll stop here and just say that one of the challenges for me in presenting to a chaplaincy program is the idea that I'm supposed to tell you something that will help you to help somebody else. I find that a little too complicated for my simple mind. I'm just going to say I hope there is something I say that you will find useful in helping others if that's your goal, but I am more oriented towards just offering to you, and I hope that you will find it useful in some way.

Just to continue with the sutta, the next thing the Buddha does, before we get to the Four Truths, is he goes through the Eightfold Path, which is actually the Fourth Truth. Again, it's not linear in the way that we might expect, like, "I'm going to give you this teaching about the Four Noble Truths and then it's all going to build from there." He has his own logic. It is quite interesting that he talks about balance and then right away, "Okay, here's the path."

The Four Noble Truths are the theory behind the path. They lay out the cause of suffering, the suffering itself, the ending of it, and the way to end it. When we get to the Four Truths, here is where the connection to addiction and recovery becomes particularly clear and useful.

The First Noble Truth: Suffering

The First Truth is the truth that there is suffering (dukkha³). If you are familiar with the problem of any kind of addiction, you know that the first issue to be dealt with is acknowledging that there is a problem. The First Noble Truth can seem simplistic: "Oh, there is suffering. Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, not having what you want is suffering, having what you don't want is suffering." But "understand" is a key word here. The Buddha says the way we should respond to this truth is that we should understand it.

I think that has layers of meaning. It means, yes, I intellectually understand it, but it also means that we feel it. We are present for our own suffering. This applies to everyone. The Four Noble Truths are not a teaching for addicts, and yet they fit perfectly with the problem of addiction. This key point is that before there can be any solution, we must understand the problem. This applies to all of us, not just people with a drinking or drug problem, or food, or gambling.

The Buddha is speaking to the world. I find the First Noble Truth to be fascinating to see how much people are in denial about suffering and don't want to look at suffering. People are afraid of suffering; people are afraid to feel their pain. It's one of the things we learn when we get serious about meditation: we see our minds turning away, trying to hold off, trying to get rid of.

The Second Noble Truth: The Cause of Suffering

The Second Noble Truth is where we make the direct connection to addiction because the cause of suffering is thirst, is craving (taṇhā). We often add in clinging.

It is the multiple ways that craving appears. The obvious one is what the Buddha calls the craving for sensual pleasure. Of course, we can say, "Oh, well, that's why I drink, because I like the feeling in my body." But obviously, there is much more to it. There is the craving to get away from feelings, to feel certain emotions, for elation, and for social reasons ("I feel more comfortable with people when I've had a couple of drinks").

Here we see the issue of self stated explicitly in the sutta. One of the causes of suffering is the craving that leads to renewed existence. This is talking about rebirth in literal terms, but really what we're talking about is the inflation of the ego. That attachment to how I look, how I am perceived in the world, how I think about myself, what I believe about myself.

The problem of the Second Noble Truth—what causes suffering—becomes more complicated than "I just need to not eat too much chocolate." It is really this craving for all kinds of pleasure. You see it when you meditate: you get bored and then you start fantasizing. That's craving. It is craving to escape; it is craving to feel good.

This is in many ways the most difficult issue that the Buddha puts before us. When we look at Dependent Origination, which is sometimes characterized as the detailed description of the Four Noble Truths, the critical point is between the experience of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling (vedanā) and the craving that arises from that. If we want to let go of craving, we need to be able to see the pleasant and unpleasant experiences and not do anything with them. Because doing something with them is so deeply conditioned, this is probably the greatest challenge for any practitioner, especially for addicts.

How can I enjoy something without becoming attached to it? For an alcoholic, the answer is: "With alcohol, I can't." But we can't shut off all sense pleasure or displeasure. This tendency to fall from "Oh, that's pleasant" to "I want more," or "That's unpleasant" to "I need to get rid of it," has to be examined and explored.

This is something that, in my experience, can only truly be developed in a meditative context because it requires a level of attention that we aren't ordinarily capable of attaining. This is one of the purposes of meditation: to be able to distinguish the process by which we have experiences that get transformed into craving, and to interrupt that process.

This is how we need to work with this Second Noble Truth. The verb associated with it is that we need to abandon the cause of suffering. That abandoning happens right in that moment between the experience of the pleasant and the craving that might arise. We simply abandon the craving. Which is, you know, easier said than done. Nonetheless, this is the process.

The Third Noble Truth: The Cessation of Suffering

The Third Truth says that if you don't fall for that, if you don't fall into craving, if you're able to step out of this process or abandon craving, you will find that there is this great sense of freedom. That is another critical moment in our spiritual development: seeing the reward for letting go.

It's not enough for someone to say, "You know, if you'll just stop craving, you'll be a more spiritually evolved person," or "You'll get enlightened," or something vague. We need to experience it. This is why it is so critical when we meditate to watch the process—and I don't mean watch it intellectually, but to feel your way through this process so that when you do let go, you feel that relief. That is what is going to motivate you to let go. We need more than the stick; we need the carrot of meditation. There is a real joy, a real pleasure that comes from just letting go of that wandering mind, that grasping mind, that fantasizing mind, that angry mind, and just being in the body. It's pleasant; it's calm. That motivates us and inspires us to let go.

The Buddha says we need to realize this. That is the verb with the Third Noble Truth. We need to realize it. Just like the First Noble Truth, we need to understand it, be present for it, and experience it. We need to be present for and experience this truth when it unfolds for us.

The Fourth Noble Truth: The Path

The Fourth Noble Truth is the path, the Eightfold Path, which is really another series of talks. But it is directly connected into the Four Truths. The first direct connection between the Four Truths and the Eightfold Path is that the first factor of the Eightfold Path, Right View, means understanding the Four Noble Truths. And the Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path. So we see they're not separate.

It's quite interesting to look at the factors of the path that are involved in each of the Four Truths.

• First Truth (Suffering): To see the truth of suffering, we need to have Mindfulness and Right View.
• Second Truth (Cause): Again, we need Mindfulness to see it, and we need Right Effort to abandon it. The key factor of Right Effort is abandoning the unwholesome.
• Third Truth (Cessation): The realization comes back to Right View and Mindfulness to see what's happening, to understand this process.
• Fourth Truth (Path): Again, is Right Effort and Mindfulness.

There is a tendency, at least in my own practice, to meditate just for the... well, let me put it another way. My failing as a meditator, particularly the first decade or two, was a lack of investigation. Investigation (dhammavicaya), which is one of the Seven Factors of Awakening⁴, is a very tricky idea. "Investigating our experience." In English, it sounds like something I'm going to do with my head. It sounds like I'm going to try to think about it or figure it out. We know with meditation that as soon as we fall into figuring out, we're just grasping. It's actually causing suffering. "I need to understand this" is just a form of desire. "I want to know." Wanting to know is dukkha because there is a sense of something that I'm lacking that I need to get. Right away I'm in conflict with my experience.

But sitting back and just feeling the breath, relaxing, feeling peaceful, spreading loving-kindness—all very wholesome. But investigation is what takes our practice from stress reduction towards spiritual transformation, towards insight. If you meditate, it's largely very beneficial, but in order to see suffering arising, I need to pay attention to the moment-by-moment process that's happening. Not thinking about it, but seeing if I can intuitively put together the interlocking elements of experience.

It doesn't hurt that we have this great teacher who has laid out that process for us, so we can kind of go, "Oh, is that happening? This feels pleasant right now. How did this pleasure arise? Alright, I was spacing out and I let it go. Oh, that's the Four Noble Truths. I see there was grasping in my mind, now I relaxed."

Seeing that over and over is training us to respond not just when we're meditating. We want to take this wisdom, these insights, into our lives and recondition ourselves. Our ordinary conditioning is: "Pleasant -> I want/grasp," "Unpleasant -> I want to get rid of/aversion." Ordinary behavior is to create suffering and live in this cycle—samsara⁵—of creating suffering. We don't do that intentionally or consciously; it's how humans are conditioned through evolution.

What we are trying to do is recondition ourselves so that when there is pleasant, we are able to go, "Oh, pleasant. Let me be with the pleasant and not try to make anything of that." Unpleasant? "That's okay, let me just be with the unpleasant and not try to make anything of that. Let me not move into grasping or aversion."

We start that as a very conscious and intentional thing, but over time it can become more of a natural response. Perhaps there is an enlightened state in which that's how you respond to everything. I'm not there. But certainly, after many years of working at this, I have a more nuanced response to pleasant and unpleasant.

Personal Example: Knee Surgery

I've recently gone through knee surgery. When I came out of the surgery, it was really interesting to see that my mind immediately went to the sensation and started breathing with the sensation and letting go of aversion. It was very instinctive—maybe because I was still on drugs—but I was like, "Oh, I feel that sensation. It's okay." There was this sense of balance for me with it.

Through this process, now six weeks, I saw that I have been trained to pay attention to sensation and to see that there is this tendency toward aversion. But if I don't go to aversion, the unpleasant sensation isn't that bad. It's very easy to immediately go, "Oh God, it's pain, I can't stand this, how can I get rid of it?" But rather to just be able to stop and go, "Oh, sensation."

Interestingly, I spent a lot of years meditating cross-legged on retreats where I would have pain in my knees, particularly in the left knee which is the one I had surgery on. I'm hoping there's no connection between the fact that I needed that surgery and my years of meditating—I don't believe there is, and doctors have told me that it's very unlikely—but in case it was, it was like, "Oh, I know how to do this." It is one of those strange things: the gift of my 40 years of meditating is that I can be okay with having knee surgery. It's a huge gift.

It's very interesting to see what happens over time. I found that the first couple of weeks I was able to really work with this. It was challenging, it was interesting, I felt engaged. Then I started to see how my mind got tired of it and I started to slip into moods and aversion to it. Just to see all that.

This is our practice: to transform these habitual habits of grasping into habits of letting go. Coming back to the broader theme of recovery, that is the training that an addict has to go through. It's why people go to 12-step meetings every day for years: in order to recondition themselves, keep hearing a different message, keep orienting in a different way, and responding differently to the pleasant or the unpleasant. To recondition their habit patterns of engagement with the world to ultimately overcoming suffering.

Q&A

Joyce: I wondered about your comments when you were talking about the First Truth, acknowledging there is suffering. What came to my mind is: "Oh yes, of course the addiction is suffering." But also, addiction is due to suffering. People often go into an addictive pattern because something is very painful that they're not wanting to look at.

Kevin: That's exactly right. Again, this is applicable to all of us, whether addicts or not, that our grasping is a response to suffering. Specifically for people who fall into addictive patterns, I would generalize two causes: one is the wish to have pleasure, and the other is the wish to get rid of pain.

These days, one of the big emphases in the treatment world is trauma. It is very common that people who fall into addictive patterns have already got a great deal of suffering—depression, anxiety, trauma. That doesn't exactly fall into the Four Noble Truth pattern in the sense that if you've been traumatized, it's not because you were grasping for something; it was because harm was done to you.

The thing that you need to let go of there... I would say that's not even a way to think about dealing with trauma. What's needed more often in that kind of suffering—trauma, depression, anxiety—is that rather than abandoning, we need to be cultivating. Cultivating self-care.

I did not mention that the verb associated with the Fourth Noble Truth is cultivation or development (bhāvanā). These are the two approaches that are part of Right Effort: there is the effort to abandon the unwholesome, and then there is the effort to cultivate the wholesome. When one is living with suffering that's not through your actions—something genetic or caused by circumstances—cultivating the wholesome is the main antidote. Working with loving-kindness, compassion, samādhi, and insight.

Victoria: I was wondering if you could go a little bit more into detail about investigation. Specifically in the context of a meditation on addiction, what exactly is the investigation that we're doing and what is the object of attention? Is it our feelings or our craving? Because I was thinking if I focus on the object of my desire, I'm afraid that it'll just end up being worse.

Kevin: That's a really good point. First of all, yes, it's feeling. To me, that is the key to investigation. When we investigate through feeling, that takes us out of the proliferation (prapañca⁶)—the mental proliferation of trying to figure things out. We're just: "Oh, I can feel this unpleasant feeling or this pleasant feeling. And oh, I see what my mind does when I have that feeling. I see the types of thoughts that arise with that. I see what happens when I stop following those thoughts." That's the basics of the investigation.

But your point about focusing on the craving itself is a really important one. My sense is that for addicts, once craving has arisen, it's almost too late to interrupt the process. It's possible, and certainly people do manage. There is a typical instruction in an AA meeting: "If you're craving a drink, call your sponsor." But in my mind, if you're craving the drink, most of the time you're going to be like, "Screw my sponsor, I'm going to go have my drink."

This is why cultivation and self-care and doing the work that keeps the craving from even arising is so important. At that point, I don't think that's meditative work initially. I think meditation comes later in this process. If somebody is on the edge, trying not to fall into a relapse or a binge, for them to meditate... their mind isn't stable enough to meditate in a constructive way. That's why if you look at the 12 Steps, meditation only comes in the 11th Step. There's a whole process recommended before that.

If somebody is at risk, they should be actively engaged in a program, very likely in therapy, and taking care of the external. Even in the way the Eightfold Path is traditionally laid out, sīla⁷ comes first. It comes before the meditation. The behavioral aspect of the path—Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood—that's the foundation.

Trying to be mindful of craving, you would have to have a very powerful concentration. If you have that kind of concentration, you probably aren't having cravings. It's sort of a Catch-22. It's more important to establish the recovery part, and then maybe you can be attuned to the feeling stage. If you can be with feeling without reacting, then you can undercut the craving from arising. But again, in order to have the subtlety of awareness and balance of mind to be aware of feeling without going into craving, that already depends upon a fair amount of samādhi.

I've never suggested to people that meditation was a recovery program. It's not. Buddhism can be a recovery program, but you really need a community. The Sangha⁸ comes first. It's kind of the opposite of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha; in recovery, it's Sangha, Dharma, Buddha.

Neil: I was wondering if you could go into some more specifics about how these insights into suffering show up when you run into an addict or someone in chaplaincy? How does it affect your interactions?

Kevin: I have the Four Noble Truths in mind, which means that I see their suffering. And what is the wholesome and skillful response to seeing someone else's suffering? It's compassion. That's a standard Buddhist idea. So the first thing is we need to bring compassion.

Being with someone else's suffering is difficult. We can fall into aversion of it, or the opposite: we can fall into trying to fix it. We have to be really careful of these two poles of responses. Can I be with it without it taking me over in a negative way? And can I be with it without the feeling that I'm responsible and have to take care of it?

Only when I can have that balanced state—the Middle Way—can I then have clarity about a wise response. There are many different responses, and we can only sort of intuit the response if our own mind is clear. One of the things you run into in 12-step programs is that people have a checklist of rote responses: "Go to more meetings, call your sponsor, get a higher power, write an inventory." Those are generically wholesome and helpful tools, but sometimes they're just the wrong thing for someone to hear.

Once we have that balanced state of compassion, we need to listen mindfully and intuitively: "What am I hearing from this person? What do they really need?" Then we have our toolbox—the recovery toolbox, meetings, support, sponsor, treatment, therapy, self-care. We have all those things to offer, but I think it's really important to respond individually to people and not to just say, "Oh, this is one size fits all."

John: There's the recovery part of this talk and addiction, and then there's the chaplaincy part. Thinking of almost chaplaincy as an addiction... the sense that we are in a hospital or a prison or wherever, where people have been suddenly uprooted from what they are attached to, and then we're attached to connecting with that in some way to be helpful. Knowing ourselves about addiction and 12-step, and knowing ourselves and studying Buddha Dharma, there may be so much of a mismatch between the views and tools we have and whatever they're familiar with.

Kevin: There are a few things you brought up that resonate for me. The first one is when you said "addiction to chaplaincy." The shadow of service is that feeling that, "I'm not going to be okay unless everybody else is okay, and they're not going to love me unless I take care of them, and I'm not worth taking care of, but these other people are." There is a variety of different ways that shadow appears.

That's the ego part of the Second Noble Truth: that need to be somebody. "I'm a Dharma teacher, I'm Kevin Griffin, I wrote a book, I'm an author, I'm an authority. Okay, everybody came here because of me." Yucky.

But yes, you can't give away what you don't have. If you're going to be of service to others, you need to have done work on yourself.