The Truth About Suffering and Why it Happens
I’ve always been interested in the literal meaning of dukkha, which is usually translated into English as suffering. The Pali word dukkha originated in the situation that happens when the axle of a wheel is off centre, making the wheel wobble as it turns. Thus, like a wheel that is not in alignment, when our lives are not in alignment we are in for a shaky ride.
But what are we supposed to be in alignment with?
All spiritual paths have their own particular concepts to describe the “what”. In Buddhism it’s expressed as being in alignment with the Four Noble Truths. These truths are sometimes viewed as dogmatic principles but it’s more helpful to see them as realities that we can investigate for ourselves.
Here’s where another wheel metaphor might be useful: Fixing a bicycle wheel so that it doesn’t wobble is known as “truing the wheel.” You true the wheel by adjusting the tension of the spokes so that they are all in balance.
It’s no accident that the way of Buddhist liberation from dukkha is symbolized by a wheel with eight spokes, representing the Fourth Noble Truth of the Eightfold Path.
So we have this metaphor of a trued wheel following a liberating path; of the wheel of dharma turning. When the wheel veers away from its “truth,” it wobbles into the ditch of dukkha and gets stuck. Stuckness pretty much sums up dukkha. Getting unstuck is our job in this life. It’s not an easy job, unfortunately. And the more we dig ourselves into a rut, the harder it gets.
How do we dig ourselves in so deeply? One word: Reactivity.
In Buddhism, reactivity is described in the teaching of Dependent Origination, which you could sum up as “one damn thing leads to another.” Although it would be better to say “one damn unseen thing leads to another.”
Here are the Four Noble Truths as I now see them:
Dukkha: Stuck in a ditch. The sense of unease or disatisfaction most of us often feel in our lives. We may sense into it as a feeling of constraint, of limitation, of being bound, tied up in a knot, stuck.
Cause: Wobbly wheel. Unseen craving, impulse, or habit energy that sparks a chain of unskillful reactions in the unaware mind.
Cessation: Getting unstuck. Waking up to the truth of what’s going on stops the reactivity, stops the dukkha. There is a great sense of relief. liberation.
Path: Truing and turning the wheel. Practical steps for experiencing dukkha less and less often. The Eight Steps are: Wise View, Wise Resolve, Wise Action, Wise Speech, Wise Livelihood, Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness and Wise Concentration.
Of all the steps on the Path, Wise View is both the most essential and the most difficult to master. We can’t really penetrate Wise View without engaging with the other steps. At the same time, we can’t follow the other seven steps properly without having Wise View as our guide. What a conundrum!
But we have to start somewhere. So we might as well start where we are. And most of us are moved to start from a place of discomfort, of stuckness, of dukkha.
We may try at first to eliminate all of our discomforts, and think this will end dukkha. But sooner or later we will realize that getting rid of discomfort just creates more of what we don’t want. Actually, temporary discomfort is not really a problem. Think about how uncomfortable it can be to get out of bed on a cold morning. Yet the reward for doing so — you get a good start to your day and avoid regret — usually exceeds the temporary pleasure of sleeping in.
Sometimes people incorrectly think that the Buddha taught that life is suffering, so suck it up. This is a misunderstanding. Like most of us, the Buddha observed that life is fraught with difficulty, such as old age, sickness, death, and loss of loved ones. There is no denying those realities. But dukkha itself is more about our unskilful reactions to these realities. We can respond with dignity or not. We can age gracefully, or not. We can complain about our aches and pains, or we can view them as natural processes that are fundamentally impersonal.
If we understand dukkha as reactivty, our task becomes clear. The Pali Cannon describes three kinds of dukkha:
Dukkha-dukkha – the suffering of suffering. This refers to the physical and emotional discomfort and pain all humans experience in their lives. How we respond to the pains and sorrows of life will determine whether we are going to experience additional dukkha. Following the spiritual path does not eliminate the pain and discomfort of being a human being in a human body in a human world. What it does do is keep us from experiencing unnecessary additional pain and suffering that is generated by the mind.
Viparinama-dukkha – the suffering of change. This refers to the suffering that arises from an inability to accept change. For instance, we will cling to a pleasurable experience, not wanting it to change. We are having fun at a party and we don’t want the party to end. We are feeling good after one glass of wine and don’t want that to end, so we have another and another. We are feeling all peaceful and calm and happy while on a retreat and we don’t want that to end. This non-acceptance of change creates more dissatisfaction. And it prevents us from truly being present to enjoy the experience.
Sankhara-dukkha – the suffering of existence. It’s the general background of anxiety and insecurity that colours even our happiest moments. Deep down, we fear that life doesn’t offer us solid ground or security. Sankhara-dukkha is characterized by the formation of thoughts, doubts, judgments, anxiety. Sankhara-dukkha has to do with our conditioning, including the traumas, the unseen psychic wounds that we are working through in this life, as well as our evolutionary instincts for survival. Sankhara-dukkha is impersonal. It’s not our fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the way things are.
For me it’s been transformative to understand dukkha not as the bad stuff that happens to me but as the unhelpful ways in which I react to the bad stuff. And bad stuff is subjective anyway. Bad things may be just the thing you need to get to a good place. Something old may need to fall away completely in order to make space for something new to arise. Nature teaches us that. The leaves that fall in the autumn enrich the soil that nourishes the roots of the trees that allow new growth to emerge in the spring.
With Wise View we see how useless it would be for a tree to get angry about losing its leaves. A tree doesn’t do that because, well, it’s a tree. It bears its lot without blame or complaint, moving through its annual cycles, continually growing until such time as it doesn’t. Then it becomes something else — house rafters, newspapers, driftwood, humous, ash. No dukkha there, just life rolling on.
—Nelle Oosterom