The Third and a Half Noble Truth

The Buddha’s teachings are like a buffet table, with lots of different things you can take from it: how to live happily in this life, how to prepare for a happy life in the next life, and how to get out of lives altogether, which doesn’t mean death—because death is a part of life—but there’s an escape from both life and death, which the Buddha said is the ultimate happiness. Yet that’s the part of the buffet table to which a lot of people say, “I’m not ready for that yet.” So there are other things you can take. 

His teaching on how to find happiness in this life basically comes down to learning how to be hardworking, taking initiative, realizing that if you’re going to make a living happily, you have to choose an honest livelihood and put forth the effort to do it well. 

Then when you’ve gained things rightly, you take care of them. 

Third, you spend in line with your income. In other words, you’re not too miserly, yet at the same time you’re not too spendthrift. We would expect the Buddha to say, “Don’t be a spendthrift,” but interestingly, he says not to be too miserly, either. He says to get some enjoyment out of the wealth you gain from your work, because if you can’t enjoy your wealth, you turn into a very shriveled kind of person. You resent the pleasures that other people find in life.

Then, finally, have good friends. Admirable friends. People who would keep you steered in the right direction. They have four qualities that he enumerates, and it turns out the four qualities are the qualities that also lead to a good life in a future rebirth. In other words, look for friends you can take as examples of how to live in a way that keeps you happy now and in lives to come.

Those qualities start with conviction, which means conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. What does that mean for you? It means that through the power of your own actions, you can make a difference in your life—your happiness depends on your actions, and the quality of your intention is what shapes the results of each action. That doesn’t mean having just good intentions. A really high-quality intention is also free of delusion, which means you have to be very reflective in what you do: looking carefully at what you do, looking at the results, learning from your mistakes, and always aiming at long-term happiness. 

We talked briefly today about when to take a stand and when not to take a stand on an issue, and it has nothing to do with your feelings about the issue. It has everything to do with what you anticipate will be the long-term consequences of what you do or don’t do. All too often we have weak conviction in that principle, because it’s too easy to go for short-term gratification, the quick fix, the things that are immediately to hand. But the Buddha wants you to adopt a larger perspective, because that’s one of the messages of his awakening: There is this possibility that you can be reborn in line with your actions. So what does that tell you about your actions, how much attention you should give to them, how much care you should take? 

That’s the first quality of a good friend and the first quality that leads to happiness in future lifetimes. 

The second quality is virtue: the desire to be harmless in your words and your deeds. This basically comes down to looking after your intentions, because the intention is what determines the quality of the action, as we said. So make sure that your intentions are harmless. 

When the Buddha was teaching his son, he basically said, “If you think that the act you intend to do could cause any harm, don’t do it. Act only on your best intentions.” It’s when you act on your best intentions that you learn. If you know you’re acting on unskillful intentions and you get bad results, you haven’t learned much. In fact, sometimes you pretend that you didn’t have those bad intentions to begin with, which means they go underground. Reflecting on your actions works only if you act on your best intentions. If they get bad results, you can say, “There’s something new I have to learn here.” If you can’t figure it out on your own, go to others for advice. 

Reflecting on your actions works only if you act on your best intentions.

We usually hear about virtue in terms of the five precepts, but it’s also expressed in qualities of the heart, qualities of the character—things like contentment, the willingness to go out of your way to be helpful to other people, the willingness not to be burdensome. Those are all parts of virtue as well. 

The third quality you look for in an admirable friend is generosity—people who like to share what they have. After all, if they’re intent on sharing, that means they probably won’t try to take things away from you unfairly. You benefit from their generosity and you also benefit from their example as a good friend, as someone who reminds you that the best things in life are not material objects—they’re qualities of the heart. 

The final quality to look for, discernment, is defined as “penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away.” At first glance, that sounds simply like seeing things coming and going, but when the Buddha adds that adjective, “penetrative,” he means that you have a good sense of when something arises, whether it’s arising for good or for bad. Where does it come from? Where is it going? What things should be encouraged and which things should not be encouraged? This kind of penetrative discernment goes together with right effort. 

Those are the qualities you look for in a friend: the friends you share your life with, the people you go to for advice. You want them to be good people because they’ll keep you on the right path. I’ve seen cases where people are industrious, they have a lot of initiative, they gain wealth, but then they start hanging around with wealthy people, using wealth as the measure of whom they’re going to take as their friends. That’s not a reliable guide for who’s going to be a trustworthy friend at all. 

Some of the best friends are not necessarily the ones who are the most brilliant conversationalists or the most successful in material terms. You want people you can take as good examples.

These are some of the Buddha’s recommendations on how to live happily in this lifetime, and then also in future lifetimes. Someone once called this the third and a half noble truth. Instead of the truth of the cessation of suffering, it’s the truth of the management of suffering. If you don’t plan to go all the way on the path, you have to realize that wherever you set your sights, there’s going to be disappointment at some point. A lot of people say, “I’m not ready for the ultimate goal yet,” but you’ve got to be forewarned that any happiness that falls short of the goal is going to leave you. 

There’s that story of the man who had lost his little son. He went to the cemetery every day to cry, and he called out again and again, “Where have you gone, my little son? Where have you gone, my little son?” He comes back from the cemetery one day, stops off to see the Buddha, and the Buddha says, “Where have you been? You look like someone who’s deranged, out of his mind.” And the man says, “How can I not feel that way? I’ve lost my only son.” The Buddha says, “Yes, there’s a lot of suffering that comes from those who are dear.” The man immediately objects, “No, it’s happiness that comes from those who are dear.” You hear so many times that when people listen to the Buddha’s talks, they’re gratified and delighted. Well, he wasn’t gratified or delighted at all. He just left. He then goes and meets up with a group of gamblers. He tells them what the Buddha said, and the gamblers agree with him: Those who are dear bring happiness. 

It’s an interesting touch on the story that that’s the attitude of gamblers: Trying to find happiness short of nirvana is a gamble.

Think about it: In the relationships we have with people who are dear to us, we’re feeding off of them, they’re feeding off of us. When the relationship goes well, you’re OK with the idea that they’re feeding off of you because you get some satisfaction feeding off of them in return. But then they die, or something happens, and somebody decides that it’s an unfair feeding arrangement and they want to put a stop to it—which is why divorce court is the most violent of all the courts in the country. 

So you have to be clear-eyed about the fact that if this is where you’re looking for your happiness, there’s going to be trouble. You’ve got to be prepared. 

You have to find something inside that you’re going to feed on when the food of relationships is either taken away from you or turns spoiled.

Have a lot of compassion; have a lot of empathy. Develop patience, equanimity, goodwill, kindness, and learn to be wise. That teaching on the discernment of arising and passing away applies very much to the happiness we have in this round of rebirth. When people die, you have to remind yourself: When does it ever happen that people who are born don’t die? Their arising holds the seeds for their passing away. You’ve got to be prepared for that. The more you prepare yourself, the less you’re going to suffer. Which means that you have to find something inside that you’re going to feed on when the food of relationships is either taken away from you or turns spoiled. You want to have something deep inside that you can fall back on. 

This is why meditation is such an important part of the training. In the Buddha’s descriptions of the path to the end of suffering, concentration lies at the heart. You may have noticed in the chant that describes the different factors of the path, the section on right concentration is the longest, because it’s the most complex and the hardest to master. But it’s also the most important, after right view.

So try to have this as your fallback, as part of that truth of the management of suffering. That way, you’ll be prepared when looking for happiness in areas where there’s going to be disappointment so that the disappointment doesn’t weigh you down.

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This piece was excerpted and adapted from a dhamma talk given on March 19, 2025, originally titled “The Management of Suffering.”