The Pain Of Doubt

T: Let’s say you understand what the middle way is, and you have clear reasoning that the only reason you suffer is because of your attitude in regard to feelings. So that’s clear to you always. And then you think, ‘But is it? Is it the case that my attitude is the cause of my suffering? Is that really true? Is the middle way the way to free myself from that suffering, to end craving? Is it really the way?’ So you have a doubt. Now what do you do? Because there’s no confirmation that, yeah this is the middle way.

N: Well, that’s what you do. If you’re still doubting it, it means you don’t have the middle way. As the Suttas say, you might have an intellectual grasp of it, a correct grasp based upon correct reasoning, but if the doubt still perverts the picture around, so to speak… So if in the face of doubt you know that is the truth, that means you are beyond doubt. You might try to doubt it, it’s not that you are beyond doubt because you refuse to allow doubt to arise. No, the question came up, ‘Is it?’ And you look at it and go ‘Yes it is.’ And each time doubt arises, ‘Is it?’ ‘Yes it is.’ Because you’ve seen it for yourself. But if you have a doubt arising and it says ‘Is it?’, and you’re like ‘I don’t know’ well, that’s the work. You don’t stop doing it because you doubt it, you do it more because you doubt it. And yes, that intellectual reasoning, that intellectual grasp of ‘It makes sense that the suffering is rooted in my attitude, not in the feelings or in the world’, yeah, that is a necessary prerequisite. Having that intellectual grasp of what the right view is gives you the direction of how to develop the right view and hence go beyond doubt.

T: So how to go beyond doubt then?

N: How to go beyond doubt, is to get that intellectual correct reasoning first, and then when you doubt it, you allow that doubt to arise. And then, why do you want to go beyond doubt? Because it’s unpleasant. So, the pain of the doubt is not rooted in doubt. It’s rooted in your craving against it, which aligns itself with your intellectual understanding of what the right view is. Craving is the root of suffering. Not, phenomena are the root of suffering, whether it’s doubt or something more physical, doesn’t matter. That’s not the root of suffering. So, through the pain of doubt, you get to see the four noble truths, for example. Or through any pain, for that matter. Through any discomfort. The discomfort of sense restraint, anxiety that arises on account of not using pleasures as the only means of escape from the unpleasantly arisen feelings, and so on. So any form of displeasure, if you suffer on account of it, you use that to see that suffering is actually in the attitude. You use that to keep applying your correctly reasoned intellectual understanding of what the right view is.

And that’s like in the Suttas, the difference between a dhammānusārī and a saddhānusārī , they are not sotāpannas yet, but they have understood the right view. But now they need to practise that, either arrive at that right view like a dhammānusārī, through that intellectual reasoning of the correct kind, or through faith, like they’re just absolutely certain that what the Buddha said must be true, and now they’re applying it. So they both still have to do the work, and that work is what takes you beyond doubt. Not, takes you beyond the ability to ask self questions, or to put your own self into question, but it takes you beyond the ability to doubt the right answer. So when you see the right answer, you know it’s the right answer. And you can doubt it, and you’ll happily doubt it, and the doubt can never pervert that order and put itself first, because the right answer now is established and seen through and through. So, how you go beyond doubt is through repetition of understanding, sufficient repetition of understanding.

T: A dhammānusārī, saddhānusārī, so intellectually you have the idea correct. But now you also need to apply that, with no result, necessarily.

N: Well exactly, the results will come. So there’s always that element of faith. In the same sense, we’ve said that before, you come and see the doctor and based on your own reasoning and knowledge that you’ve acquired about your condition, you have a pretty safe bet that out of all the doctors, this will probably be the right one. It makes most sense, not just by reputation, but even by what you can understand that his medicine is, you see ‘Based on everything that I know so far, this is most likely going to work, or least, least likely to be wrong out of everything.’ But you still need to apply that medicine. Because if you say ‘Yes, he’s right’, but you’re not applying the medicine, it makes no difference to your condition. Because fundamentally the whole reason you went to the doctor is to cure yourself from your condition of dukkha. So, either way, you have to apply it. It’s not like ‘This doctor is the greatest!’ Why do you think so? ‘I have no clue.’ OK, well did you apply his teaching and confirm that he’s the greatest? ‘No I haven’t.’ Well then your faith is useless and meaningless. But if your faith is like ‘I have faith that this is least likely to be wrong, and I know that based on my experience of other doctors, and other applications, and other medicines. OK, so let me apply this, and then I’ll verify if it’s right or if it’s wrong, if I’m cured of dukkha or I’m not cured of dukkha.

T: You apply it once?

N: The medicine tells you, you’ll need to apply this for a sufficient amount of time. So, OK, you don’t apply it indefinitely for the rest of your life, without any confirmation. Because the Buddha himself said, if you do it rightly, the results will have to come. So that’s also a good criteria that you can use. For example, you might be convinced that this is the right doctor, yet here you are, twenty years later, you’re still subject to dukkha. So is it the right doctor though? Have I been doing everything rightly? If so, well then the instruction was not right, because I’m not free from this condition. But sometimes people refuse to look at that, and admire the doctor for the rest of their life, and they are still not cured. There are only two reasons you won’t be cured: either you’re doing it wrongly, with the right instruction, or the instruction is not right. And you must investigate both if there are no results. Sure, don’t expect results within one day or five days, or something. Don’t even expect it within a year, because most people’s minds today are lazy and driven to sensuality, so it’s gonna take you a bit longer than that. But you know, five years of doing something… Like, ‘Well, am I free from doubt, free from suffering, or not? How long will I keep this faith without any verification going? Maybe I need to re-evaluate certain things, including the doctor.’

The problem with that is, it gets harder to re-evaluate the doctor if you spend more time invested in his instruction, because it feels like the conclusion of my re-evaluation might be ‘I have to start again. I don’t want to start again!’ Well, there you go, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. No, you always have to be willing to start again, even thirty years later, if you’re not free from suffering. If you’re free from suffering you know there is no starting again, this is it, this is the direction that just needs to be developed further. But if you still doubt that you’re free from suffering, and are afraid to start again, practically, what you are afraid of is the practice. Because starting again is part of the practice. Part of the finding the right doctor. And then yes, if you find the right doctor and free yourself from suffering, then you might see, in hindsight, that all these previous doctors that were not so right, actually did contribute towards your right search. So, it was part of the same progress. But not if you decide you’re not going to start again. That’s it, you remain stuck with the wrong doctor out of fear to do the work again.

You do want to get somewhere. You want to be cured of the condition that makes you liable to sickness, ageing, and death. I mean the Suttas cannot be more clear on that. So here you are, practising the Buddha’s teaching seemingly with the attitude of, ‘All of this is just another becoming, becoming a sotāpanna.’ Yes, it’s the right becoming. You use the right becoming to overcome the wrong becoming. And then an arahant goes beyond becoming. But if you start dismissing becoming anything because you couldn’t do it, well basically you’re now dismissing the possibility of freedom from suffering. Because why wouldn’t you want to become free from suffering? ‘Oh, becoming is bad.’ Sure, relatively speaking. But you can’t just dismiss becoming of any kind while you’re still subjected to these unwholesome things and you don’t know the way out of suffering. It’s an excuse, it’s basically becomes like, you got stuck with your doctor, now you feel too old or you’ve got too much invested time in this direction to re-evaluate to start again, there’s just no way. That’s why the longer you wait to start questioning yourself rightly, the harder it will be, because as the Suttas say, you are accumulating burden, papañca, proliferation. It’s an accumulation, it’s not a static thing, and at any given time you can just give it all up. No, the more you’ve been engaging with the attitude of not giving it up, the harder it will be to give it up later on. So don’t wait until that burden becomes too much to give it up.

T: And if you’re doing things rightly…

N: There has to be a result. Again, there’s the simile in the Suttas we refer to often, the hen sitting on her eggs. Even if she doesn’t think ‘May these chicks pierce out safely through the shell’, they will, because she’s doing the work.

T: So, if you are doing the work, you’re confident about the middle way…

N: You’re beyond doubt.

T: But doubt is still arising. Fear is still arising. Lust, anger are still arising. And then you think ‘Well, that shouldn’t be the case. I should know the truth, apply it…’

N: Well then you’re not confident in the middle way. You start by saying you’re confident in the middle way, but then these things arise, and you doubt, and you think you shouldn’t, that means you’re not confident in the middle way. If you’re confident in the middle way, you would know that these things would still arise, but you know the escape from them. You know what to do.

T: You know where the problem is.

N: Well exactly, exactly. The problem with all those things you listed is that it makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes you suffer. It causes painful feeling, and [if you are confident in the middle way] you know the escape in regard to painful feeling, other than sensuality, other than giving in. Now, somebody who is confident in the middle way might become careless, lose the sense of urgency, content with knowing the escape. ‘Oh, now I have confirmed that this is the right doctor, I already felt the improvement, but then I get careless, I go out, expose the wound to the sun’, or the dirt, as the Buddha would say. And you’re not cured, although you know the way out, you still keep yourself sick through negligence. But, sooner or later, you have to address it. If a person truly has the right view, they cannot pretend and ignore the problem for, well, no more than seven lifetimes, as the Suttas say. So that’s the thing, like, for a sotāpanna for example, who is obviously not free from sensuality, he can still have pressing desires, he might even give in to them out of carelessness, but fundamentally the pain of it is understood, the root of the pain is understood. Which is, your own craving. Not the sensuality, not the beautiful objects, not the ugly objects, not the desire, not the lack of desire. The pain is understood, the escape from the pain is understood, the origin and the way leading out of it and so on, that’s all understood. In other words, you know exactly where the problem is, and by knowing where the problem is, you know how to solve the problem. But you do also know that it would take time and the application and not becoming negligent.

T: Because if you’ve been spending your whole life cultivating lust, or anger, and then you know the middle way, and you’ve confirmed it, it’s not like the lust or the anger that you’ve been habitually doing…

N: Of course, of course. Just knowing the escape, it’s already significantly diminished. So yes, a noble disciple who is not fully enlightened yet can certainly still experience sensual desire and anger, but to a degree. It’s not like a puthujjana’s anger and a puthujjana’s sensuality and a puthujjana’s negligence, because he doesn’t know the way out. A puthujjana doesn’t know the way out, so it’s far worse.

T: It can only go so far.

N: Exactly. So knowing the way out, it’s already a massive step towards the escape. And the Buddha himself said that. He said gaining the right view, the amount of suffering that’s left for somebody with the right view, it’s like seven grains of sand, and one without the right view, it’s like the mount Sumeru in the Suttas. So that’s like a gigantic, Himalaya amount of suffering, if you don’t have the right view. Just getting the right view diminishes that to seven grains of sand. Now the seven grains of sand is the practice of a sotāpanna to an arahant.

T: Lust arises.

N: Lust arises, ill-will arises, and so on. Hindrances arise.

T: There’s a desire for pleasure. There’s a desire to avoid pain.

N: All a noble disciple would have to do is practise sense restraint. He wouldn’t need to then be dealing with the doubt as well, whether this is the way out, because he knows. All he needs to do is not give into that impulse towards lust, or ill-will, or negligence. All he needs to do is abstain from the impulse, and that already results in clarity of what’s there, the understanding of dukkha, and so on. So nekkhammasaṅkappa, developed sufficiently, thoughts of renunciation, arahantship. For somebody with the right view. And that’s where the work is, for a noble disciple. That’s why we often talk about enduring, and so on. Allowing things to endure, that’s already the beginning of it.

T: Doubt is always a tricky one, isn’t it?

N: Yeah, you feel like ‘I must address this’, but the point you realise is well, no, the only reason I want to address this is because I want to get rid of the pain of it, not find the right answer. Because you already know the right answer, and that’s when that doubt causes people to obsess irrationally, neurotically. ‘Yeah, but what if? Yeah, but what if? Yeah, but what if?’ And each time you provide the right answer, and you know it’s the right answer. If you were not affected emotionally by that doubt, if somebody were to ask you that same question, you would give the same answer, you know that is the truth. But your weakness does not lie in the fact that you don’t have the right answer, it lies in the fact that you can’t bear the pain of the doubt. So that’s why none of the answers can satisfy it, because you’re not really answering for the sake of the answer. You’re answering it for the sake of not feeling the pain, and that doesn’t work. You will feel the pain, because you act out of pain. So your answer is, you’re acting out of pain because I don’t want the pain. Which means, I need to endure the pain. Not revolve around answering the doubt. So if you endure the pain sufficiently, practise thoughts of renunciation of your answering the doubt, refraining from it, then this is the escape of doubt, it’s the escape of dukkha, it’s the escape of pain. Not, it’s finding the right answer. That’s rooted in not wanting the pain. So why don’t you want the pain? Because I don’t know the way out of it. Or because I do know the way out of it, but I’m just impatient and I want it to go away, I don’t want to have to deal with it. So, you’re not practising rightly then.

T: I want the pleasure of not having doubt.

N: Well, I want the pleasure of not having pain. The only reason doubt is a problem is because you don’t want to deal with the pain of it. That’s it. And by the way, even in mundane terms, not just in terms of Dhamma and right view and sotāpatti. When people’s minds revolve around doubt, they revolve around it because of the pain of it. Not because of not having enough information, or clarity in regard to answering the doubt. That’s why doubt is a hindrance. Because it presents itself as if you need an answer for clarity, but in reality it’s masked the problem, the problem is the pain, and each time you try to give an answer, all you do is act out of not wanting pain. And that’s why pain will be there. Because you’re feeding it.

So, endure the doubt. ‘What if my chicks don’t pierce, what if they do this, what if I do that?’ So the hen gets up, sits, goes, moves the eggs, that’s why the chicks will not pierce safely from the eggs. Because, out of her doubt, she keeps moving around and not sitting on the eggs. But it doesn’t matter if she doubts, ‘Will my chicks pierce, will they not? What will happen to them?’ If she doesn’t move on account of doubt, and endures it, and keeps siting on the chicks, they will pierce out. And when she sees that once, twice, three times, doubt will become meaningless. And you went beyond doubt. Because ‘What if, what if?’ There is no ‘What if’. I’ve done this sufficiently enough that I know what I need to do for the chicks to pierce out safely. But if she keeps fidgeting around and moving, she’s actually not doing the work, on account of trying to fix the doubt, and deal with it, and make sure that her chicks pierce out safely, ironically enough. ‘I must find the answer in order to practise rightly, and that’s why… I’m not practising rightly. Because I keep acting out of pain and doubt.’ So that’s why acting out of doubt is always unwholesome. And even in our Vinaya rules, acting out of doubt is a wrong doing. Even if what you did turned out not to be against the rules, the fact that you acted out of doubt was a minor breach of the rules. So if you doubt, you don’t do it. Even if it might be like, ‘Maybe it will be the right answer’, yeah, but it’s rooted in doubt, which means my priority is not the right answer, it’s not the clarity of understanding, my priority is getting rid of the discomfort of the doubt. And that’s wrong.