In “Why Suffering?”, Emily Horn opens an eight-week exploration of the Four Noble Truths in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha by asking the question underneath them: why did the Buddha start with suffering? Drawing on Gil Fronsdal’s research into the liberating insights, a disarming exchange with her eleven-year-old, and Jack Kornfield’s reminder that “there’s more to life than suffering,” she reframes the truths not as doctrine to accept, but as an investigation to live—a doorway into freedom.
If you find this teaching helpful, consider joining the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha, for the remainder of the Liberating Insights, or for any of the other training opportunities happening there.
💬 Transcript
Emily Horn: So I want to sense into, if you’re up for it with me, sense into the overall framework of the liberating insights as a big part of what we would like to explore together for the next eight weeks, all right? Starting today. And I’ll give a little bit of information around the historical context of the liberating insights, and a little bit about how it became the Four Noble Truths, in just a moment.
But before that, I want to just sense into, and imagine, if you’re up to imagine with me, why the Buddha started with suffering. Just the basic, simple question of: why even do this practice? Or why would he even start with suffering? Imagining that he would — and he did. Because that is where the Four Noble Truths... like the first one, it does start with: okay, there is suffering. There is suffering. And the Four Noble Truths present it like, okay, this is a fact. This is true — and are you on board? Are you not on board? You don’t have to view it that way. I’m not asking you to view it that way. That kind of a statement leads me into that in a little bit.
But if we back up and just sense into it and imagine ourselves as Buddhas, all right? Why would we start with suffering? Now, some people don’t start with suffering.
We’re beginning again together. And why, why would we start with suffering? Some people’s doorway — and my doorway, in a lot of ways — was suffering, is suffering. All right, doorway into what? So then the other truths come online. Doorway into the freedom.
That’s how I feel — like a doorway. Like, you walk through it, and there’s something on the other side. And the Four Noble Truths are set up to kind of lead us like, “Okay, here’s this. Here it is,” and let’s go through the process of walking through the doorway into liberation, all right?
Now, if I were to read it like one, two, three, four — the truth of suffering, there is suffering, there are causes of suffering, there is freedom from suffering, and then here’s the Eightfold Path and the way you do all this — if I let that land in my system, my nervous system, and maybe you will with me, it feels different than if I kind of take a back...
If I back up and say, “Okay, well, why start with suffering? Why would the Buddha have started with suffering?” Not that I’ll have it all figured out or have an exact answer, but there is something about being willing not to turn away and just say, “Okay, yeah, there is suffering.” And maybe I can imagine the Buddha — maybe that was the first “what the fuck” kind of question.
Like, what the fuck is this? Like, why is there suffering? Why? All right. Why? Why, why, why, why? And that can lead us in a different, in a certain direction, that question why. I put “why” in my Google browser recently, and I got big questions. Like, why are gas prices so high? Why is the United States at war with Iran? Big questions. All right? So when we ask why, it really expands the playing field, and in that playing field, there’s all kinds of perspectives, there’s all kinds of stories, there’s all kinds of answers. So why is a broad question. Why would the Buddha start with suffering, right?
Well, in some ways, when I asked my kid — I was like, “Do you want to come to my group?” I asked my kid. He’s eleven. I said, “You want to come to my group today? I’m talking about the Noble Truths. It’s about suffering.” And he’s just like, “Yeah, this is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Why did you bring me into this world when there is suffering? And that’s the truth.” And he’s mad. Like, he’s legitimately mad, and I understand. Maybe some of you can feel this way, too. Like, that’s part of what brought me into Buddhism, is I’m mad. It’s like, I see the suffering, and I’m mad, and so why the fuck am I here? Like, maybe it was one of the original Buddhas, like, “What?”
And he was kind of set up pretty... He was pretty well set up, all right? In the story, right? He was pretty well set up. And he still... Like, set up meaning he had a lot of resources, financial resources. That’s one kind of suffering, and that will... And when we enter into this landscape, and why, and suffering, it becomes so vast.
So it’s like, okay, we’re gonna be in these sessions kind of teetering back and forth, just like how, how, why do we want to expand, all right, to include this sense of suffering? And then how can we zoom in and say, “Okay, wait, wait, wait. In this moment, can we... Will you be with me, and let’s zoom in to the Buddha, and the imaginary Buddha, and the suffering when he was looking around at all his, like...”
Oh, yeah, he was resourced, but he still saw that people were suffering on the streets. He still saw that there was some sort of dissatisfaction he had in his own life. He was resourced, but it was just not... There was something there, right? This is the story. All right. So in some ways when I ask my kid, and he’s like, “Yeah.” All right? My kid has... We have our basic needs met, so that is where I’m entering into this conversation from, right — the context of which we’ll have it from — is I’m gonna be holding the space with you, all right, knowing that in this moment, my sense is that we’re all in this particular group resourced enough to be here with this conversation and this exploration.
All right? And then I told my kid, it’s like, “Yeah, why do you think the Buddha started with suffering?” And he said, “Because it’s the truest of all the truths.” All right. And I said, “Can I tell that story?” He’s like, “Yeah, as long as you don’t tell my name.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So it’s the truest of all the truths, and I thought it was so interesting because, how many of us...
There are Four Noble Truths, you hear that, but how many of us stick to suffering? All right? We kind of stick to it, and it’s like Jack Kornfield, who was one of my first heart teachers — and I studied a really long time with him — he looked at me one time and says, “Emily, there’s more to life than suffering.”
And this is after years and years and years of practice, and years and years and years of silent retreats, and really looking into suffering and the causes of suffering and the freedoms, and how we cultivate freedom from suffering. And he looks at me, he’s like, “Well, do you know how many people are loyal to their suffering?”
And I was like, “Oh.” So that’s interesting. The Four Noble Truths and the way that it’s laid out can lead... It doesn’t have to, but it can lead us into this doctrinal, kind of static way that our cognitive minds work, and we just get a piece of information or an idea, and then we just kind of stick to it.
And then we kind of... What happens? We lose something in that process of cognizing. It kind of makes it solid — appear solid. Yeah? But really, when the Buddha was originally teaching, he was teaching it as an experiment, as a practice, as an investigation. He wasn’t saying, “This is true” necessarily. He was saying, “This is what I propose that you investigate.” All right?
And this is... I’m gonna give you a little bit of cognitive information and framework and history here. All right? So in The Buddha’s Four Liberating Insights: A Reevaluation of the Central Buddhist Teaching by Gil Fronsdal — which I will actually give you access to, you can open that in your browser and read it later — I want to provide some sources, so that if you want to dig more deeply into this and you have that kind of orientation, go for it. But I’m gonna make broad strokes, because that’s just the way my mind and nervous system orient to things. I broad stroke, and I really focus on the practice and the direct experimentation of it, because that’s what’s alive and immediate for me, and that’s what makes me excited. All right? However, I do want you to know enough of where this comes from and how I’m influenced, because it also influences our collective view — and I’ll talk more about view in a moment.
So in this, Gil Fronsdal is a scholar. He’s very oriented in that direction. He’s very well-studied, and I really appreciate how much research and heart he puts behind the way he comes up with things. So he’s looked at so many different sources and has really come up with that.
He says, a search for passages containing wording of the Four Noble Truths — there’s not a whole lot of information about the Buddha saying, “These are the Four Noble Truths.” That wording came up later, all right? In the very early documentation of the tradition — ‘cause remember, this is a tradition that was passed down verbally, which is probably a lot of the reasoning for the lists, because they’re ways to remember, especially when you’re telling stories. It’s easier to remember that way. It’s easier to learn, and this is a practiced tradition. So the very early documented descriptions of the way the Buddha invited us into this investigation into suffering was — these are the words, okay? He says, “This is suffering. This is the origin of suffering” — which, Gil Fronsdal, we’re gonna be unpacking this so much more deeply over the next eight weeks.
But he says that the translation of origin, which a lot of times you do hear — origin of suffering — even origin can be translated differently, and it will change how we practice. All right? The subtle distinctions. So even origin can change, and he says the arising, arising of suffering. Now sense that. Origin, to me, it’s like there’s a source, and then it’s just like that’s the source all the time. But arising puts it more... How does that impact you? How does that impact you? It puts us in a process, yeah? It puts us in a process.
So there’s a... So this is suffering. This is the arising of suffering. This is the cessation of suffering. This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering. And he says that there are passages containing this wording — over 200 occurrences of this wording — in the Pali suttas. All right? So this is the wording that’s emphasized, all right, in the early Theravadan Buddhist tradition.
All right? And keeping in mind that in this particular series, we are gonna zoom into the first turning and look at it through that view, which really does emphasize the personal liberation. All right? We’re gonna start to look into, okay, so this is suffering. Can we recognize it? How do we recognize it? All right. What are the flavors of it in our direct experience? So we’re gonna zoom into our direct experience. Can we see the arising of it? All right. Can we see the arising of it? When we see the arising of it, can we see the cessation of it? Do we know the cessation of it? Can we sense the cessation of it? Can we cultivate the knowing and the trust of the cessation of it, to the ending of it? That it’s not always here — that there is a way out, so to speak. All right? So to speak. And then we’re gonna really sense into the way leading to the cessation of suffering, which we will unpack more as we go forward, because that is really interesting, too.
Typically, it’s translated as the Eightfold Path. All right? And so I will sprinkle the Eightfold Path along these eight weeks as ways to kind of tune into the investigation of suffering, the arising of suffering, and the cessation of suffering. All right? But we’re gonna sense into our own way into practicing with this, right, given the framework of the tradition.
And right now we’re kind of aligning our view, which is the first part of the Eightfold Path. What’s the view? It’s one thing to say, “Okay, why suffering?” But what are we really doing? Can we zoom in our view? And that’s what I’ll ask us to do now. Can we kind of like zoom in our view and tweak our question just a little bit, all right, to make it more like a hypothesis?
Why is pretty broad. If we’re forming research questions, sometimes it’s helpful to narrow the focus. Some of you might do research, right? And when we narrow the focus, maybe we come up with a different question. And you might have a particular question that you are investigating around this sense of — so what is... If I say this is suffering, what is that? All right, what is that?
And because we’re zooming into the internal and the first person and this internal sense of suffering, I just want to also name that when we see it here, part of what we’ll do over the next seven weeks is we’ll start to see it out there. All right? Or maybe we see it out there, and then we start to see it in here. And then we’ll start to see... We’re gonna bring in mindfulness — mindfulness internally, mindfulness externally, mindfulness internally, externally. All right? And that’s how we’ll start to gradually sense into the collective, because the collective is still here in our interpersonal and our personal.
But we’ll sense into the collective more and more gradually, starting with what’s arising in us, and then in this group, and then we’ll see how it affects our life, and we’ll gradually get bigger and bigger until we imagine what it would be like to all be able to be embodied and directly know that this is suffering.
All right? There is arising of suffering. However, there’s also the passing of suffering, all right? And there’s a way that we can continue to cultivate being in process of — in some ways we could say — falling asleep and waking up, right? Falling asleep and waking up, and being tender with that.
And I really want to invite us to, because... It’s a big ask. The Buddha — I could imagine why he was like, “Let’s start with suffering” — is because, yes, it’s a big ask. He found directly some ways to start to support other people into deepening into this freedom. And then he also was like, it’s really challenging. You can’t just be like, “Okay, look into suffering. Oh, that’s easy.” No, there’s all this support structure in the tradition so that it enables us to be able to do that.
It’s like the view starts to fine-tune into, okay, so we’re investigating suffering with the view that there is liberation, and there are gonna be insights leading into that. All right? And the insights we can start with, I’m very familiar with in the insight meditation tradition. Insight, right? Insight into impermanence — and that’s the main thing that the Buddha was teaching, is insight into impermanence, when he was saying, “This is suffering. This is the arising of suffering, and this is the cessation of suffering.” Impermanence. So here the doorway into freedom is the direct investigation of suffering and impermanence. So you have suffering, insight into suffering, insight into impermanence, and then the other one that we’ll be in process around is investigating insight into what the tradition would call no self.
All right? No self. And really simply, in this moment, my proposal to you is that with no self... We’re in such a process in any given moment, everything is so impermanent, that if we start to solidify around a sense of self, then it loops us back into suffering. All right? So we’re gonna be really looking at these cycles and the way the teachings kind of scaffold off each other — with the Eightfold Path, the Four Noble Truths, and the liberating insights.
Starting with today, starting to resource so that we can see more clearly. Because suffering — if we just focus on suffering, like my kid is so determined to do, it’s gonna create more suffering. And there’s a lot more. All right? There’s a lot more. My first suggestion to all of us, when we begin this — and a lot of the traditions start there, or a lot of different strands of Buddhism and practices start here — is cultivating some sense of steadiness.
All right? Some sense of steadiness. It’s like preparing the ground so we can turn up the microscope to see more clearly. And then we’ll begin to scaffold more into practices around where we can meet the suffering, say, “This, this is it,” see the arising of it, hold it as impermanent, and then really sense into what it would be like to live in a more freely embodied way.
And to me that becomes more of an imaginal practice here together, because this world today, we are far from any sense of a collective freedom.
