NO SELF, NO SUFFERING – Buddhism as a Self-Help Guide
BY MELVIN MCLEOD| JULY 28, 2022 https://www.lionsroar.com/no-self-no-suffering/
- Our lives are pervaded by suffering, both obvious and subtle.
- There is an identifiable cause of our suffering.
- Because we know its cause, we can free ourselves from suffering.
- There is a specific path we can follow to end suffering, which consists of meditation, wisdom, and ethical living.

The Truth of Suffering
The Buddha said that life is marked by dukkha. That’s usually translated as “suffering,” but it can also mean “struggle.” In fact, the Buddha defined nirvana—the end of suffering—as the total absence of struggle, complete peace. We often say that life is a struggle. What that really means is that it’s a never-ending struggle to maintain our sense of ourselves as separate, independent, and at some level permanent. That’s a painful and futile struggle because it flies in the face of the most fundamental qualities of reality—change and impermanence. As the Buddha famously said, all compounded phenomena disintegrate. That includes us. Nothing in life is solid and everything is always changing. There is nothing we can hold on to. Everything is impermanent and dies. And yet we try. Endlessly, moment after moment, we struggle to create a solid sense of ourself, which inevitably changes and disintegrates, and must be recreated. This endless process of creation, disintegration, and recreation, which gives us the illusion of a continuous self, is what is known in Buddhism as samsara, the realm of struggle and suffering we are caught in. At some level we know there is no solid self we can rely on—we know deep down that our existence is questionable—and so our lives are marked by a subtle, underlying fear of emptiness and nonexistence. There is wisdom in this. We are right—we don’t really exist, at least not in the way we think we do. The other way we try to maintain the mistaken self is to build around it a solid world we can depend on, one whose existence confirms our own existence. But this too is impossible, because of change and impermanence, and so it leads to all kinds of other suffering. Nothing in life is solid and everything is always changing. There is nothing we can hold on to. Everything is impermanent and dies. As the Buddha said, all meeting ends in parting. We will inevitably lose what we treasure and love. That’s heartbreaking. Equally heartbreaking, we will inevitably suffer bad and painful experiences we don’t want. And no matter what, we will lose everything in the end, because we will die. In a real sense, this whole mistaken self, and the whole mistaken world we create to confirm it, is nothing but an attempt to deny the reality of death. Buddhism traditionally categorizes suffering in these three ways—losing what we want, getting what we don’t want, and our underlying feelings of fear and unease. This is suffering we cause ourselves by our denial of reality, and Buddhism teaches us ways to develop the wisdom to free ourselves from it. But there is another kind of suffering we need to add—the suffering caused by other people and their egos. I don’t need to catalogue all the terrible ways people treat each other. You know them as well I do. In our personal lives—in the family, relationships, workplaces—people make us suffer and we make them suffer. And in every part of the world, billions of people suffer violence, deprivation, and denial of their full humanity at the hands of other people in the form of unjust and uncaring political, economic, and social systems. Expanding the first noble truth to include these types of suffering is the modern world’s contribution to Buddhism. And it is Buddhism’s contribution to the modern world, because the four noble truths help us better understand these forms of suffering and how to alleviate them.The Cause of Suffering
According to the Buddha, the basic cause of suffering is ignorance, our fundamental misunderstanding of the true nature of ourselves and reality. We’ve already talked about that in general terms, so let’s look at specific ways the mistaken self operates, both individually and in society, to cause endless suffering. Ego is at root concerned with only one thing—itself. Protecting itself, maintaining itself, pleasing itself. As the Dalai Lama famously said, we all feel we’re the most important thing in the world.
