Buddhism and personal suffering

Cut from our paper

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how conceptual abstraction relates to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

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As I described last week, this week I’ve been engaged in the mind-melting process of trying to appease (or even please!) five reviewers plus an editor on our academic paper. The good news: it’s gone well! Though a vast amount of cleanup and polish remains to be done, we have restructured the whole paper and addressed many of the reviewers’ concerns.

In order to address certain things missing from the paper, we have of course had to add quite a bit of text — in particular, discussion of pragmatist thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. This has meant that we’ve had to cut a lot of things.

Cutting writing can be painful, especially when weeks or months have been spent honing it. But that’s been one advantage of the five months it took to receive the reviews back; I’ve lost a lot of attachment to the writing.

This week, I thought I’d give you an entire section that we cut from the paper, because I still think it’s valuable, it’s just that it no longer fits in the paper’s current structure. So here’s an excerpt of the paper, lighlty edited, on how concepts relate to suffering.

Dependent arising and suffering

Buddhism provides a potent practical methodology for reducing suffering in a doctrine called “dependent arising,” which poses two responses to each moment of awareness (SN 12.3). The first response—what Buddha terms “with-the-grain”—accepts appearances at face value and seeks to alter them. This approach employs linear, causal thinking towards goal-directed actions, dividing a reified self from a reified world. It typically leads to judging this relationship as unsatisfactory, prompting the “self” to seek satisfaction through actions driven by “craving” and “aversion.” The resulting sense of dissatisfaction is traditionally translated as “suffering.” While this default mode is necessary for practical results, when unchecked it leads to anxiety and depression (e.g., A-Tjak et al 2015).

The alternative approach—“against-the-grain”—resists the temptation to act and accepts experience as it is in the moment, while recognising its conditional dependencies. Unlike “with-the-grain,” it doesn’t attempt to create categorical judgements or pursue goals. Instead, it cultivates awareness of how experiences arise and pass away, without immediate reaction. Crucially, it involves investigating the conditions from which concepts like “self” and “world” emerge. This mode requires deliberate training: learning to resist both the impulse toward logical analysis and the urge for immediate action in order to witness how concepts arise. While the full practice involves a nuanced understanding, even simple everyday acts like meditation or mindfully persisting through physical discomfort during exercise are examples of acting “against-the-grain.”

These two modes align with the distinction between concepts and experience: “with-the-grain” corresponds to conceptual reasoning, while “against-the-grain” engages with direct experience before conceptualisation (intuition, in both Kant’s sense and the everyday sense). Critically, the collective experience of meditators across millennia suggests that “against-the-grain” practice can effectively reduce suffering (e.g., Goyal et al 2014).

Suffering arises, more specifically, when we accept concepts as self-evidently true—particularly the concept of a self divided from the world. From this “self-view” (“I am this,” “This is mine”), opinions arise and proliferate through conceptual chains of reasoning: “This person thinks A is bad, and I am A, therefore this person thinks I am bad.” Buddhism calls this rumination process papança, where “with-the-grain” thinking leads to leaping to conclusions, producing what Ñāṇananda (2012) describes as a “labyrinthine network of concepts... a tangled maze with its apparent objectivity [that] ultimately obsesses and overwhelms.”

Living in proliferation means living amid rigid concepts, suffering when categories clash with experience or are overgeneralized. The conceptual mode suppresses inconsistent information, as in active inference (Seth and Tsakiris 2018). Buddhism offers a solution: returning to the experiential mode, by seeing through the illusion of a fixed conceptual self, then examining patterns of suffering through dependent arising. In active inference, this amounts to revising prior beliefs. In the Diabetes example, learning to separate conceptual calculation from experiential awareness means understanding when to trust the formula versus when to attend to embodied sensations; these are different, and they can’t be entirely collapsed into “both.”

This “against the grain” process examines suffering’s conditions, asking not “What single cause led to this?” but “Without which conditions would this not have arisen?” Where “with-the-grain” seeks control and prediction, “against-the-grain” aims to understand and contextualize. As conceptual categories become less rigid, the craving for certainty diminishes—and with it, suffering. This ancient approach parallels modern therapeutic practices: cognitive-behavioral therapy similarly targets over-generalizations and black-and-white thinking, addressing the conceptual rigidity that amplifies suffering (Cuijpers et al. 2019; Hofmann et al. 2012).

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Although this section didn’t survive our revisions, the Buddhist distinction is central to my thinking. The Pāli terms I’ve translated as “with-the-grain” and “against-the-grain”—anuloma and paṭiloma—literally mean “with the hair” and “against the hair.” This refers to how it feels to stroke an animal’s fur in one direction or the other: one way feels smooth, the other resistant. They name something we all recognise: the difference between reacting automatically, following our habitual inclinations, and pausing to investigate how our experience is actually structured. The latter is uncomfortable, which is why it requires practice. But it’s also where the grip of suffering loosens. If you’re curious about the broader argument, you can read the full paper when it’s published—I’ll share details here once it’s out.

Me stroking my friend’s cat. The Pāli terms anuloma and paṭiloma literally mean “with the hair” and “against the hair.” Going against the grain of our habitual reactions is uncomfortable, but it’s where suffering loosens its grip.

If you liked this piece, please share it, or let me know in the comments!

Best,

Bryan

For a fuller description of dependent arising…