Live Session Summary, Sunday, March 23, 2025: It was good to be with you for our live session today. The focus of the session was on the Buddha’s teaching of the ‘two arrows’, the arrow of pain and the arrow of suffering.
Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live session:
I began by highlighting the fact that the teaching on the two arrows is an original teaching of the Buddha written down in one of the five major collections of his teachings in the Pali language, known as the Samyutta Nikaya, or Connected Discourses. (The other major collections are the Middle-Length Discourses, the Long Discourses, the Numerical Discourses, and a varied collection of teachings.)
In the teaching on the Two Arrows, the Buddha pointed to the different ways an ordinary person deals with pain (physical, emotional, mental) and how a dedicated follower or practitioner responds to pain. For the ordinary person (which the Buddha termed an ‘uninstructed worlding’), when they experience pain they tend to respond by resisting the pain—for example, by seeking pleasant experiences or blaming someone, or getting angry, or blaming themselves as a way of avoiding feeling the original pain.
So, the Buddha said, it’s like being hit by one arrow and then being hit by another—the pain of the original experience is compounded or magnified by the suffering that comes from resisting the original pain. This is how we add a second arrow—the arrow of suffering—to the original arrow of pain.
In contrast to the ordinary person, the ‘well instructed noble disciple’, or practitioner, experiences the first arrow—the original pain, discomfort, or unpleasantness—but instead of adding a second arrow of resistance to the original pain, the practitioner stays with the original experience in the body, mind, and emotions, and allows sensations, thoughts, and feelings to come and go. When they are experienced in this way—without trying to avoid or resist them—they lose their toxicity or afflictive quality. They become like a storm passing through. They are not ‘me’ or who I am. As Eckhart Tolle said in The Power of Now, ‘What you accept fully, you go beyond.’
This teaching on the Two Arrows is captured in the well-known contemporary saying that ‘pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.’ Pain is an inevitable part of life—of birth, sickness, aging, loss, dying—but it does not have to lead to suffering. It is only when we cling or resist or try to escape from our direct experience that we add the second arrow of suffering to the original and inevitable pain of experience—and of life.
This teaching of the Two Arrows is an elaboration of the Buddha’s central teaching of the Four Noble Truths (of suffering; the cause of suffering—clinging; the end of suffering—Nirvana, or freedom/awakening; and the path to the end of suffering—the Noble Eightfold Path).
The key to ending suffering in our life is to learn to open to our experience just as it is here and now—and to keep training the body, mind, and heart to be willing and steady enough to keep coming back to our experience here and now. As Dorothy Hunt says in her poem, “Peace is this moment without judgment // This moment in the heartspace // Where everything that is is welcome.” (Hunt, ‘Peace is this moment without judgment’)
Freedom is always available here and now when we say ‘yes’ to our experience rather than resisting it.
This teaching on the Two Arrows is particularly valuable as many of us, particularly in the U.S., find ourselves facing actions and policies that we view as cruel, inhuman, and lacking in compassion. It is natural for us to respond to these many actions by feeling pain—for example, sadness at the human costs, concern about where this is all leading, anger at the cruelty…
But when we add a second arrow by reacting with fear, anger, blame, or judgment, or by tuning out completely, we inevitably suffer. We create separation, turn those we disagree with into ‘unreal others’ (in Tara Brach’s term) and compound divisions between ‘us’ (the ‘good people’) and ‘them’ (the ‘bad people’), or some version of this.
The liberating alternative is to stay with the original pain—opening to our experience just as it is, without resistance. In this way we prevent the first arrow from leading habitually into adding the second arrow. Needless to say, this is not easy and this is why we need a path of training that will build the muscle, as it were, to be able to open more and more to difficult, painful, or unpleasant feelings and experiences without turning them into ‘me’ or ‘mine’—'my anger’ or ‘my beliefs being right.’
The poems I shared include:
• “Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.” (Wu Men)
• ‘Walk Slowly’ by Danna Faulds
• I also mentioned a book by Alan Watts, a well-known Zen teacher, called ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity.’
Have a good week ahead, watch out for second arrows, and I look forward to seeing you for our next live session on Sunday, April 13 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏 💜
