True People

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

True People

The world needs more true people—those who are accountable and compassionate in their actions. Human society, to be livable, has to be based on trust, and people true in this way are the only ones really worthy of trust.

The Buddha offers a way to train people to be true, starting with their experience of pain.

Pain, he once noted, sparks two reactions: The first is bewilderment—we don’t understand why it’s happening—and the second is a search for a way out. In his words, “A person overcome with pain, exhausted in mind, comes to search outside, ‘Who knows a way or two to stop this pain?’” (AN 6:63)

We wrack our brains trying to figure out a way to escape from pain, and when we’re at our wits’ end, we look for help outside. This is the reaction of a newborn infant suffering from physical pain, crying for its mother, and it’s a reaction that, in more sophisticated forms, stays with us until the problem of suffering, both physical and mental, has been fully solved.

Which means that, for most people, this reaction stays with us throughout life and into death.

Our life in human society is shaped both by the fact that we feel pain and by our search, conscious or unconscious, for people who can tell us ways to stop that pain.

It also means that our search is aimed at finding three kinds of truth: a true reality—the ending of pain; true information on how to reach that reality; and true people: those who have direct knowledge of how to end pain—in other words, they really know what they’re talking about and aren’t just reporting hearsay—and who are compassionate enough to be truthful in sharing what they know.

Now, because our search comes from bewilderment, it can lead in many directions, with varying degrees of success. Again and again, we’ve been easily duped. Seeing the need for a reliable response to this search, the Buddha offered his teaching on suffering and the end of suffering.

However, his response went beyond simply showing how to end pains that have already arisen and encompassed a knowledge of how to prevent them from arising in the first place. Instead of just putting out fires already started, he showed how to reach a dimension where the fires couldn’t start. By encompassing this dimension, he turned the ordinary search for an end to pain into what he called the noble search.

The ignoble search, he said, looks for an end to pain in things that age, grow ill, and die. This kind of search is ignoble because its answer to the problem of suffering is simply to offer more suffering: more things that will change, leaving you where you were before, if not worse.

The noble search, on the other hand, looks for something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, and doesn’t die, for only when your mind has found something beyond the reach of aging, illness, and death can you be totally beyond the problem of suffering.

The Buddha claimed to have completed the noble search, and in completing it he had also found that the path to the end of suffering was something other people could accomplish as well. So he offered to teach them how.

In this way, he was offering all three kinds of truth to satisfy our search: the end of suffering—nibbāna—as a true reality, the Dhamma as true information on how to get there, and himself as a true person—someone who was speaking from direct, reliable experience and who had the compassion to report that experience accurately.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the Miscellaneous Essays (2020), “Becoming a True Person.”

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Pāli Canon

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