Suffering
The Buddha summed up Buddhism in four words. Dukkha Samudaya Nirodha Magga. Suffering Cause Cessation Path. In other words: a way to ease suffering. And here it’s not entirely clear what exactly we’re talking about.
Buddhism only opens up if you live through each word. Let’s try to unpack what this suffering is about, since it’s the foundation.
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism: Dukkha.
Translating dukkha as “suffering” gave Buddhism terrible PR.
– So you’re saying life is suffering? Meanwhile I’m sitting here having a great time, ha.
The Sanskrit dukkha consists of duh (“bad,” “difficult”) and kha (“axle,” “space”). Literally – “an unsteady axle of a wheel,” disharmony, imbalance, the roughness of existence.
Dukkha refers not to the external world but to personal experience. In Buddhism, suffering means all the painful attachments and the unpleasant feelings they produce throughout life, caused by desires to possess, avoid, or ignore reality.
Even in ordinary situations the mind generates dukkha through comparison, expectation, interpretation. It is the very conditioned nature of existence. Suffering intensifies through the belief that we can control the external world or our own states. Dukkha is restless dissatisfaction.
– It shouldn’t be like this!
Existence itself carries a taste of dukkha. The brain is programmed for dissatisfaction. As the Buddha said, if you’ve been hit by an arrow, don’t stick in a second one. The pain only gets worse from agonizing over it. The second arrow is you. There is no “bad” out there – it exists in the human world and comes from the human.
The opposite of dukkha is sukha (“happiness,” from su – “good” + kha), meaning “a smooth axle,” harmony. The feeling that everything is “right.”
Recognizing the problem is the first step toward liberation.
Many practicing Buddhists mistakenly treat it as a religion, and their faith is often “naive, begging, and superstitious,” which prevents them from embracing Buddhism’s true principles.
In Soviet scholarship the prevailing view was that Buddhism, with its preaching of submission, humility, and acceptance of reality, leads most followers “to abandon the struggle for social and political change,” and that exploiting classes have long used this.
Understanding the universality of dukkha gives rise to compassion for all beings trapped in samsara.
“Suffering is like the mud from which the lotus of compassion and understanding grows.”
Observing dukkha in daily life (for example, through meditation) destroys the illusion that happiness depends on external conditions.
As the Buddha said, if you’ve been hit by an arrow, don’t stick in a second one. You got sick – that’s the first arrow.
We mask the fear of death by acting as though we’ll never die.
It’s simpler not to be afraid. Be a projector, not a receiver of reality. Be the cause of change.
In each of us, both a projector and a receiver of reality operate simultaneously. And when you’re not projecting anything, the receiver runs full blast – everything piles on, you start digging out, then you need a break, and off it goes again…
We live as if we won’t die, but we die as if we never lived. When you’re creating what you want, there’s nothing to rest from.
Here’s an insight for you.
We probe the inner surface of the mind with our attention, like a tentacle constantly touching different thoughts, objects, sensations. Mastery lies in distinguishing which ones not to touch, not to give them any play.
I noticed that I catch subtler little thoughts now, and I don’t think them. Micro-comparisons, micro-envy, micro-judgments, and so on.
You can hold your attention.