Birth Is Suffering

Jātipi dukkhā. Birth is suffering.

I heard someone recently explaining the Buddha’s list of the different forms of suffering. He came to this one and said, “Well, that’s behind us now.” The problem is that it’s not behind us. We have it behind us, but we also have it ahead of us if we’re not careful. Each time it happens, it’s like a throw of the dice.

As they say, the opportunities that are open to you are based on your past karma. But look at your karma—you don’t even have to look at past lifetimes; look at your karma in this lifetime—and you realize you’ve got a mixed bag. You’ve done skillful things and unskillful things. And only a very well-trained mind can be sure to focus on the skillful things at the moment of death and rebirth. Because it’s what you focus on: That’s what creates the state of becoming.

There will be a desire of one form or another. Around the focal point of that desire, it will form either a world—the world in which that object exists—or an identity. Sometimes your desire is not so much about what you want to get out of the world. It’s more about what you would like to be. This is when becoming begins. Then you go in for it: That’s birth.

You can notice when you fall asleep how random the process is. We talk about our dreams sometimes with a sense of disbelief. How could that have happened? How could that dream have occurred to you? Well, the same thing happens with rebirth. Sometimes it’s very unlikely, and yet it happens. So we have to train our minds so that we’ll have some control over where they go.

The Buddha talks about having a self rightly directed. You’re fortunate in this lifetime you’ve got some past merit you can depend on, but that’s not going to be enough. You have to make sure you focus yourself in the right direction. And basically the right direction is out.

As the Buddha said, the people who hang around and try to develop the world are not following his teachings. The ones following his teachings are those who want to get out, realizing that this is the best course for everybody because even if you’re here to be a good person, you’re a burden on so many other beings.

This is one of the reasons why we have that reflection on the requisites every day. The simple fact that you’ve got a body means that you’re going to need food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. There are a lot of supply lines involved in all of those things and a lot of pain and suffering for the people in those lines. You come into the world with lots of needs. You’re going to have to lay claim to things. The problem is that other people will be laying a claim as well, and then we get into battles over our claims.

We do a lot of unskillful things in those battles. That’s something we have to watch out for: seeing that somebody else really misbehaved, behaved in a cruel or unfair fashion, and then getting fixated on that. That becomes the focal point for another becoming.

It goes on and on and on.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the talk “Birth Is Suffering,” June 2, 2020. [Also in (pdf) format.]