Suffering

The Buddha packed the essence of Buddhism into four words: Dukkha Samudaya Nirodha Magga — Suffering, Origin, Cessation, Path. A way to ease suffering. And here’s where it gets unclear — what kind of suffering are we talking about?

Translating dukkha as “suffering” gave Buddhism bad marketing. Life is agony, yet here I am sitting, drinking coffee, scrolling the feed — bliss. Where’s the logic?

The Sanskrit duḥkha literally means “an unsteady axle of a wheel” (duḥ — bad, kha — axle). Disharmony, imbalance, the roughness of existence.

The mind constantly generates dukkha through comparisons, expectations, interpretations. It’s the very conditionedness of existence. Suffering intensifies through the belief that we can control the external world or our own states. Dukkha is a restless dissatisfaction. Riding a crooked cart, it shakes, it creaks…

— It shouldn’t be like this!

Existence itself carries a taste of dukkha. The brain is programmed for dissatisfaction. As the Buddha said, if an arrow hits you, don’t stick in a second one. Dukkha is not the external world — it’s the reaction to it. The second arrow is you yourself. The mind that eternally compares and looks for flaws. The belief that you can fix life once and for all.

— The tea is bitter? Just drink the bitter tea.

The opposite of dukkha is sukha (happiness, from su — good + kha), meaning “a smooth axle,” harmony with the flow of life. The feeling that everything is “right.” Sukha is not about avoiding pain — it’s about stopping the second arrows.

The first step is to acknowledge the problem. Dissatisfaction is not the enemy — it’s fuel for growth. The Buddha left instructions too, the Eightfold Path, but for starters it’s enough to stop complicating what simply is.