One of the most central teachings of the Buddha is the teaching of the Four Noble Truths. It’s a teaching I like to revisit often, and every so often I like to explore it through a teaching that’s a little more off the beaten path.
It comes from the Sutta Nipata, believed to be among the earliest collections of the Buddha’s teachings. Unlike the later texts, which became carefully organized into lists, this collection is more evocative, more poetic. Some scholars even believe it may be closer to how the Buddha actually spoke.
One of the things I love about this particular sutta is that it’s one of the few places where the Buddha speaks vulnerably about his own experience before awakening. Even though these words were spoken roughly 2,500 years ago, they feel just as applicable today.
The sutta is called the Attadanda Sutta. The word danda means “stick,” but not just any stick—a stick used as a weapon. So Attadanda can be understood as “taking up arms.”
It begins:
Fear is born from arming oneself.
Just see how many people fight.
I’ll tell you about the dreadful fear that caused me to shake all over.
Seeing creatures flopping around, like fish in water too shallow, so hostile to one another. Seeing this, I became afraid.
This world completely lacks essence; it trembles in all directions. I longed to find myself a place unscathed, but I could not see it.
Seeing people locked in conflict, I became completely distraught. But then I discerned, here, a thorn—hard to see, lodged deep in the heart. It is only when pierced by this thorn that one runs in all directions. So when the thorn is taken out, one does not run, and settles down.
Let’s break this down line by line.
“Fear is born from arming oneself.”
When the mind takes up arms—defensiveness, righteousness, the weapon of judgment—fear is never far behind. We can see this collectively. Fear turns into aggression. Opinions harden into identities. It feels as though our capacity to simply disagree without becoming enemies has become increasingly rare.
When we prepare for attack or defense, we assume threat. We create the world we expect. The moment I brace myself, I invite the very tension I’m bracing against. Certainly, there are things to be afraid of. But it’s also worth noticing how much fear is generated by our own defensiveness.
The Buddha isn’t denying fear; quite the opposite. He admits to being overwhelmed by it. “I’ll tell you about the dreadful fear that caused me to shake all over.” It’s such a visceral image. Fear isn’t described philosophically—it is felt in the body.
“Seeing creatures flopping around, like fish in water too shallow.”
For me, the water too shallow is a metaphor for the perception of scarcity. Hostility often arises wherever there is perceived scarcity—whether emotional, material, relational, or existential. So many of us are flailing in these little puddles: puddles of opinion, of certainty, of wounded identity, of ancient fear.
The headlines blur into one another, one terrible story after another. But the fear itself isn’t necessarily irrational. There is a kind of fear that is simply an empathetic response to suffering. In that sense, fear can even become a form of wisdom. When we allow ourselves to feel individual or collective fear without turning away, it can awaken the heart of compassion.
I’ve lived with a kind of existential dread for more than a decade. It’s always there in the background. You stay busy, occupy the mind, get through the day, and then when everything gets quiet, it’s suddenly obvious—like the hum of an air conditioner you never noticed until the room falls silent.
During a two-month retreat in 2017, that dread became my predominant experience. I tried everything I could think of to calm it, make it disappear, or change my relationship to it, but nothing quite worked. Eventually I spoke with one of my teachers. He said, “I’m sorry that you’re suffering, but I’m not sorry that you’re experiencing dread.” There was a long pause. Then he said, “Because the dread means that you still care.”
That was a seismic shift for me. The dread itself was unpleasant, but underneath it was love. I wouldn’t experience that kind of dread if I were indifferent. It’s almost the price we pay for having a heart that is still capable of caring. Since then, whenever the feeling of dread returns, I try to remember what’s underneath it.
“This world completely lacks essence, it trembles in all directions.”
This is one of the insights that comes from meditation practice — and we all know it intellectually, but it’s so hard to actually take it seriously. I used to hear people say, “all things are impermanent.” But I think a better translation is inconstant — things are always in flux. Or even better: everything is in process.
Even this bowl, as fixed as it may seem — if you look at it through a quantum lens, there’s a lot happening. There’s a process that’s unfolding. And before it becomes liberating, this realization becomes a kind of shock.
People often have this experience in a meditative state where they’re just touching into impermanence in a way where everything is sort of dissolving and reforming, dissolving and reforming — and it’s kind of overwhelming. Or you just realize, in a very profound way, that whatever you’ve been organizing your life around is often for fleeting moments of satisfaction.
As Gloria Steinem said, the truth will set you free — but first it will **** you off.
“I longed to find myself a place unscathed — but I could not see it.”
This is the thing that brings us into any kind of spiritual practice: a desire to find some place where we can rest, where we can feel at home, where we can have a sense of well-being, ease, relaxation. To feel worthy, to feel loved, to feel belonging — different flavors of this for our individual patterning and life history.
It’s the longing that brings one into spiritual practice. I long to find myself a place unscathed. But I couldn’t see it. Because refuge is not found in a place. There is no place, in this samsaric realm, that is free of the basic unsatisfactoriness of experience — because it’s fleeting and always changing, because we are subject to aging and sickness, to losing everything that we value, and ultimately to death.
Nirvana, awakening — there’s a sutra where the Buddha offers 32 different names for it: the unbinding, the deathless. Fingers pointing at the moon of what this experience is. But it’s not a place. And so the inability to find a sanctuary in some place leads us to search inward.
“Seeing people completely locked in conflict, I became completely distraught. But then I discerned a thorn — hard to see, lodged deep in the heart.”
The conflict is endemic, and watching it is heartbreaking. We have the unique privilege — if you want to call it that — of having access to all the gory details of what’s happening around the world. But the Buddha doesn’t stay there. He pivots inward.
This is also a compassionate move. Pierced by the reality of other people’s suffering, the heart makes a movement — a movement toward compassion, where at least there’s a commitment to not make things worse. Not contributing more to that collective suffering.
The thorn is a metaphor for what the Buddha called tanha — which we usually translate as craving, or clinging, or aversion. Sometimes it takes the form of conceit. And it’s subtle. It’s hard to see, because it’s very deeply embedded and often unconscious.
This is where the Four Noble Truths begin to come into focus.
The First Noble Truth
There is suffering: that’s the insight, the realization. It points to a vast continuum, from what is just slightly annoying to great human suffering. There’s a thread of not-quite-satisfactoriness running through human experience. Good things happen, but they don’t last. Bad things happen. There’s no reliable place to plant the flag of “This is my source of well-being, this is where I feel safe, loved, at home.”
I’ll say that hearing these words for the first time was surprisingly liberating. I was fairly young and had a blessed life, without an enormous amount of suffering. But when I did suffer or have stress, I always thought it was my fault — what we would call “user error” now. And hearing someone say, “this is actually how things are,” felt liberating. Years later I heard someone say, “suffering is a feature, not a bug.” It’s a feature because it’s the thing that pivots us into some transformational work.
The practice instruction of the first Noble Truth is: suffering is to be understood, suffering is to be known. What you often hear in meditation spaces is the invitation to turn toward the rougher edges of experience — not so we suffer more, but so we begin to see the conditions that create the arising of that experience.
The Second Noble Truth
Suffering is caused by the thorn in the heart — by clinging and aversion. And the practice instruction is: clinging and aversion are to be abandoned. That’s why we say the heart of the practice is letting go.
It is only when pierced by this thorn that one runs in all directions. If the thorn is taken out, one does not run, and settles down. The restlessness of life — the search for pleasure, status, escape, distraction — is often driven by this wound. Trying to find a place unscathed.
So this is eminently practical. As you’re walking around, doing your life, when you notice some reactivity — a spike of anger, anything that feels unpleasant or difficult or challenging — you can just drop in the question: What am I clinging to in this moment? What do I think should be happening? What do I think should not be happening? What do I think I need? What am I afraid of?
All versions of it pointing to the same thing: to illuminate the view, the belief, whatever it is. Sometimes it’s the need to be right. When I do this practice, it’s never blank — when I drop in and ask what am I clinging to, the laundry list appears. So you pick one thing, and then you just try to soften. Trust that data is being gathered, and getting processed into wisdom.
As much as we think we need to figure out, or solve, or understand — there’s something emergent that arises on a deeper level. Master Dogen said, paraphrasing: Myriads of people have been helped by the way. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the instructions. The instruction, essentially, is just to be aware. And then there’s feedback that happens.
The Third and Fourth Noble Truth
Release is possible. Sometimes this is taught in a medical model: the disease, or the symptoms, are suffering. The cause of the disease is clinging and aversion. The prognosis is good, because release is possible. And the Fourth Noble Truth is a whole set of practices — organizing principles for our lives — that will move us away from clinging and toward the movement of letting go.
What went before, let go of that.
All that’s to come, have none of it.
Don’t hold on to what’s in between,
and you’ll be wonderfully at peace.
This is radical non-attachment. You often hear “let go of the past and let go of the future” — but now we’re adding: let go of the present. And then you’re wonderfully at peace. Still in this realm of samsara. But at peace.
The illusion of ownership is what creates the battleground. Jack Kornfield often says: the things that you think you own, you’re just borrowing for the time you have on this planet.
Selflessness is not a thing to find, but a kind of illusion to see through. And radical non-attachment — this even includes non-identification with having nothing.
I met someone who had a house in the Palisades that completely burned down. His car burned down. Tragically, he lost his dog. He lives alone, has no relatives. And he said to me, here in this room: I lost everything. Every single possession I have has been burned. I don’t have anything. And I feel so free.
Which was just really beautiful to hear. There’s no clinging left. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to miss or be absent. And that’s the freedom that actually ends fear.
What went before, let go of that. All that’s to come, have none of it. Don’t hold on to what’s in between — and you’ll be wonderfully at peace.