2 | Two Dilemmas

2  |  TWO DILEMMAS

On the night of his awakening, as he searched for a way to gain release from suffering and stress, the Buddha found himself confronted with two dilemmas.

The first had to do with the possibility of a path to the end of suffering. If there was a dimension free of suffering and stress, it had to be unconditioned—or in his terms, unfabricated (asaṅkhata). In other words, it couldn’t be something put together from other conditions. That was because anything put together would have to come from changeable causes, so it would have to be changeable too, and anything changeable has to entail stress. The question, then, was how any human activity, which is put together from intentions, could possibly bring something unfabricated about.

The second dilemma had to do with the causes of suffering. As he came to see, suffering is caused by any form of craving that leads to becoming—the act of taking on an identity as a being within a world of experience. However, he also discovered that the types of craving leading to becoming include not only craving for becoming, but also craving for non-becoming: the desire to see any existing becoming destroyed. This meant that two paths of action were closed to him: He couldn’t act on the desire to fabricate a state of becoming free from suffering, and he couldn’t act on the desire to destroy any states of becoming he had already fabricated.

The Buddha’s solution to both dilemmas was strategic. His way out of the first dilemma was to realize that although fabricated actions couldn’t bring about the unfabricated, it was possible to fabricate a path of action that led to the threshold of the unfabricated. From there, he could abandon the path and arrive at his goal. He later compared this process to building a raft to cross a river and then abandoning the raft on reaching the far shore (MN 22; SN 35:197).

His way out of the second dilemma was part of that path. He kept watching the raw material from which the mind fabricates states of becoming, and viewed them “as they had come to be” (Iti 49) in a way that would develop dispassion for them before the mind had a chance to fabricate anything further out of them. In this way, no new states of becoming would be fabricated, and any existing states of becoming would naturally disband when their causes ceased. This approach, in turn, required that he not look at experience in terms of the basic concepts of becoming—“self-identity,” “being,” or “world”—but simply in terms of the raw materials—the fabrications—from which ideas of “self,” “being,” or “world” could be constructed. At the same time, he would have to fabricate perceptions to help develop dispassion for all fabrications.

By combining these two approaches, the Buddha found a way to the unfabricated that involved fabrications in three ways: He had to use fabrications to develop a skillful way to view fabrications with dispassion, allowing him to abandon all fabrications. This was the heart of his skill as a strategist.

This means that when we read his teachings—which are fabrications that he left behind—and we want to get the most out of them, we have to read them strategically, too. We can’t regard them simply as a worldview that we’re deciding whether or not to adopt, for that would lead to more becoming. At the same time, we can’t regard them as lying outside the realm of fabrication, for that would lead us to mistaking them for the goal. Instead, because they are fabrications, and because all fabrications are for the sake of something, we have to ask what the teachings are for: the goal, or attha, at which they aim; how they are meant to perform in leading to that goal; and how they’re best to be used to actually attain that goal.

The Buddha made this point clear in formulating the overarching framework of his teachings: the four noble truths—the truths of suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. In each case, he didn’t simply set out the truth. He also associated each truth with a specific duty: Suffering was to be comprehended to the point of dispassion, its cause was to be abandoned, its cessation realized, and the path to its cessation developed, all for the sake of bringing that cessation about and arriving at the unfabricated.

If we compare these four duties with the way the Buddha used fabrications in his own path of practice, we can see that the duties for the first, second, and fourth truths correspond roughly to the three ways the Buddha dealt with fabrications: viewing, abandoning, and using. This means that to understand which fabrication is to be used in which way, we have to see which noble truth it falls under.

But the Buddha’s strategy shows that we can’t stop there. Given that all fabrications ultimately have to be abandoned, we also have to figure out how far to use and regard fabrications before we let them all go. A first step in understanding the role of fabrication in the practice is to understand the various frameworks under which the Buddha discussed fabrications. That allows us to identify which fabrications should be treated with which of the duties associated with the four noble truths. As it turns out, it will also show how some fabrications can fall under different noble truths at different stages in the path. From there we can more readily gain a sense of when a particular fabrication, even when it’s used on the path, has to be further developed, and when and how it should be skillfully abandoned in a way that arrives at the threshold of the goal at which all the teachings are aimed.