Dukkha (
Pāli;
Sanskrit:
duḥkha;
Tibetan phonetic:
dukngal) is a
Buddhist term commonly translated as "
suffering", "stress", "anxiety", or "dissatisfaction". Dukkha is identified as the first of the
Four Noble Truths.
Within the Buddhist tradition, dukkha is commonly explained according
to three different patterns or categories. In the first category,
dukkha includes the obvious physical suffering or pain associated with
giving birth, growing old, physical illness and the process of dying.
These outer discomforts are referred to as the
dukkha of ordinary suffering (
dukkha-dukkha).
In a second category, dukkha also includes the anxiety or stress of
trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing; these inner
anxieties are called the
dukkha produced by change (
vipariṇāma-dukkha).
The third pattern or category of dukkha refers to a basic
unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of life because all forms of life
are impermanent and constantly changing. On this level, the term
indicates a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up
to our expectations or standards. This subtle dissatisfaction is
referred to as the
dukkha of conditioned states (
saṃkhāra-dukkha).
Neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but realistic
The central importance of
dukkha in Buddhist philosophy is not
intended to present a pessimistic view of life, but rather to present a
realistic practical assessment of the human condition—that all beings
must experience suffering and pain at some point in their lives,
including the inevitable sufferings of illness, aging, and death.
Contemporary Buddhist teachers and translators emphasize that while the
central message of Buddhism is optimistic, the Buddhist view of our
situation in life (the conditions that we live in) is neither
pessimistic nor optimistic, but realistic.
[a]
Walpola Rahula explains the importance of this realistic point of view:
First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor
optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a
realistic view of life and of the world. It looks at things objectively
(yathābhūtam). It does not falsely lull you into living in a fool's
paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize you with all kinds of
imaginary fears and sins. It tells you exactly and objectively what you
are and what the world around you is, and shows you the way to perfect
freedom, peace, tranquility and happiness. One physician may gravely
exaggerate an illness and give up hope altogether. Another may
ignorantly declare that there is no illness and that no treatment is
necessary, thus deceiving the patient with a false consolation. You may
call the first one pessimistic and the second optimistic. Both are
equally dangerous. But a third physician diagnoses the symptoms
correctly, understands the cause and the nature of the illness, sees
clearly that it can be cured, and courageously administers a course of
treatment, thus saving his patient. The Buddha is like the last
physician. He is the wise and scientific doctor for the ills of the
world (Bhisakka or Bhaisajya-guru).
Surya Das emphasizes the matter-of-fact nature of dukkha:
Buddha Dharma does not teach that everything is
suffering. What Buddhism does say is that life, by its nature, is
difficult, flawed, and imperfect. [...] That's the nature of life, and
that's the First Noble Truth. From the Buddhist point of view, this is
not a judgement of life's joys and sorrows; this is a simple,
down-to-earth, matter-of-fact description.
The Buddha acknowledged that there is both happiness and sorrow in
the world, but he taught that even when we have some kind of happiness,
it is not permanent; it is subject to change. And due to this unstable,
impermanent nature of all things, everything we experience is said to
have the quality of
duhkha or unsatisfactoriness. Therefore
unless we can gain insight into that truth, and understand what is
really able to provide lasting happiness, and what is unable to provide
happiness, the experience of dissatisfaction will persist.
[web 4]
Three patterns
Within the Buddhist tradition, dukkha is commonly explained according to three different patterns or levels or categories:
[b][web 5][web 6][web 7][web 8]
- Dukkha of ordinary suffering
- Pali: dukkha-dukkha
- Also referred to as the suffering of suffering.
- Includes the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness, death, and coming across what is not desirable.
- This outer level of dukkha includes all of the obvious physical
suffering or pain associated with giving birth, growing old, physical
illness and the process of dying.
- Dukkha produced by change
- Pali: viparinama-dukkha
- Also referred to as: suffering of change or suffering of impermanence.
- Includes two categories: trying to hold onto what is desirable, and not getting what you want.
- Buddhist author Chogyam Trungpa includes the category "not knowing what you want."
- Pema Chödrön described this type of suffering as the suffering of trying to hold onto things that are always changing.
- This inner level of dukkha includes the anxiety or stress of trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing.
- Dukkha of conditioned states
- Pali sankhara-dukkha
- Also referred to as all-pervasive suffering
- This category is also identified as one of the "eight types of suffering".
- Pema Chodron
describes this as the suffering of ego-clinging; the suffering of
struggling with life as it is, as it presents itself to you; struggling
against outer situations and yourself, your own emotions and thoughts,
rather than just opening and allowing.
- This is a subtle form of suffering arising as a reaction to qualities of conditioned things, including the skandhas, the factors constituting the human mind.
- This is the deepest, most subtle level of dukkha; it includes "a
basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all existence, all forms of life, due
to the fact that all forms of life are changing, impermanent and
without any inner core or substance."[web 9]
- On this level, the term indicates a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.
Types
Eight types
Dukkha can also be categorized into eight types belonging to the
three categories of: inherited suffering, the suffering between the
period of birth and death, and general misery. Chogyam Trunga explains
these categories as follows:
[c]
Inherited suffering:
- Birth: the discomfort of birth and experiencing the world for
the first time; and the discomfort of relating to new demands or
experiences.
- Old age: the discomfort involved in the process of aging and
growing old; this can apply to psychological as well as physical
discomfort of aging.
- Sickness: the discomfort of physical or psychological illness.
- Death: includes the pain of separation and not being able to
continue on in your endeavors, as well as the physical discomfort of
dying.
Suffering between the periods of birth and death:
- Getting what you don't want: being unable to avoid difficult or painful situations.
- Not being able to hold onto what is desirable: the pain of trying to hold onto what is desirable, lovely, splendid, terrific.
- Not getting what you do want: this underlies the previous two categories; the anxiety of not getting what you want.
General misery:
- All-pervasive suffering: a very subtle dissatisfaction that
exists all the time; it arises as a reaction to the qualities of
conditioned things (e.g. the impermanence of things).
Six types
Aung San Suu Kyi presented a list of
six great dukkha at her
Nobel Lecture, delivered on 16 June, 2012. These are:
[web 11]
Three marks of existence
Dukkha is also listed among the
three marks of existence. These are:
In this context,
dukkha denotes the experience that all formations (
sankhara) are impermanent (
anicca)
- thus it explains the qualities which make the mind as fluctuating and
impermanent entities. It is therefore also a gateway to
anatta, not-self.
Developing insight into dukkha
Canonical Buddhist teachings emphasize the importance of practicing
meditation to develop insight into dukkha. The subtle nature of dukkha
eludes an unprepared mind, as noted in
Samyutta Nikaya #35, in which the Buddha says:
What ordinary folk call happiness, the enlightened ones call dukkha.
The
Anapanasati Sutta and
Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta each affirm that a person first needs to practice
meditation (jnana) to purify the mind of the
five hindrances to insight before contemplating the
Four Noble Truths, which begin with the nature of "dukkha" in life.
Without experience of
meditation,
one's knowledge of the world is too limited to fully understand dukkha,
as required by the first noble truth, and proceed to enlightenment.
Contemporary scholar Micheal Carrithers also emphasizes the need to
examine one's life. Carrithers asserts that insofar as it is dynamic,
ever-changing, uncontrollable and not finally satisfactory, unexamined
life is itself precisely dukkha.
Carrithers also asserts that the question which underlay the Buddha's
quest was "in what may I place lasting relevance?" He did not deny that
there are satisfactions in experience: the exercise of
vipassana
assumes that the meditator sees instances of happiness clearly. Pain is
to be seen as pain, and pleasure as pleasure. It is denied that
happiness dependent on conditions will be secure and lasting.
Contemporary Buddhist teacher Ajahn Brahm emphasizes this point using
a simile that compares the experience of dukkha to being in prison, and
compares meditation (Pali:
jhana) to a tunnel that leads out of the prison:
[d]
Another simile [...] is that of the man who was
born and raised in a prison and who has never set foot outside. All he
knows is prison life. He would have no conception of the freedom that is
beyond his world. And he would not understand that prison is suffering.
If anybody suggested that his world was dukkha, he would disagree, for
prison is the limit of his experience. But one day he might find the
escape tunnel dug long ago that leads beyond the prison walls to the
unimaginable and expansive world of real freedom. Only when he has
entered that tunnel and escaped from his prison does he realize how much
suffering prison actually was, and the end of that suffering, escaping
from jail is happiness.
In this simile the prison is the body, the high prison walls are the
five senses, and the relentless demanding prison guard is one's own
will, the doer. The tunnel dug long ago, through which one escapes, is
called jhana [meditation] (as at AN IX, 42). Only when one has
experienced jhana does one realize that the five-sense world, even at
its best, is really a five-walled prison, some parts of it is a little
more comfortable but still a jail with everyone on death row! Only after
deep jhana does one realize that "will" was the torturer, masquerading
as freedom, but preventing one ever resting happily at peace. Only
outside of prison can one gain the data that produces the deep insight
that discovers the truth about dukkha.
In summary, without experience of jhana, one's knowledge of the world is
too limited to fully understand dukkha, as required by the first noble
truth, and proceed to enlightenment.
Contemporary Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa explains that meditation is designed to develop an understanding of dukkha:
Understanding suffering [dukkha] is very important.
The practice of meditation is designed not to develop pleasure, but to
understand the truth of suffering; and in order to understand the truth
of suffering, one also has to understand the truth of awareness. When
true awareness takes place, suffering does not exist. Through awareness,
suffering is somewhat changed in its perspective. It is not necessarily
that you do not suffer, but the haunting quality that fundamentally you
are in trouble is removed. It is like removing a splinter. It might
hurt, and you might still feel pain, but the basic cause of that pain,
the ego, has been removed.
Relation to the five skandhas
According to the Buddhist tradition,
the dukkha of conditioned states (
saṃkhāra-dukkha) is related to clinging to the
skandhas. Oxford scholar Noa Ronkin discusses the relation between the
skandhas (Sanskrit; Pali:
khandhas) and dukkha:
Her conclusion is that the associating of the five
skandhas as a whole with dukkha indicates that experience is a
combination of a straightforward cognitive process together with the
psychological orientation that colours it in terms of
unsatisfactoriness. Experience is thus both cognitive and affective, and
cannot be separated from perception. As one's perception changes, so
one's experience is different: we each have our own particular
cognitions, perceptions and volitional activities in our own particular
way and degree, and our own way of responding to and interpreting our
experience is our very experience. In harmony with this line of
thought, Gethin observes that the skandhas are presented as five aspects
of the nature of conditioned existence from the point of view of the
experiencing subject; five aspects of one's experience. Hence each
khandha represents 'a complex class of phenomena that is continuously
arising and falling away in response to processes of consciousness based
on the six spheres of sense. They thus become the five upādānakhandhas,
encompassing both grasping and all that is grasped.'
Within Buddhist literature
Dukkha appears frequently in Buddhist texts. Jeffrey Po explains:
- Dukkha is an extremely important concept and is central to
understanding Buddhism in its entirety. It appears in the first of the
Four Noble Truths and as one of the Three Characteristics of Existence.
References to "dukkha" as one of life's situations abound in many of the
suttas delivered by Lord Buddha Himself as well as in numerous Buddhist
philosophical and psychological thoughts.[web 12]
The
Four Noble Truths
deal with the nature of "dukkha" in life, what is the cause of
"dukkha", the cessation (cure) for "dukkha", and the techniques to bring
about the cessation of "dukkha".
The first noble truth is presented within the Buddha's first discourse,
Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dharma (Dharmacakra Pravartana Sūtra), as follows:
[web 13]
- "This is the noble truth of dukkha: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death
is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are dukkha;
union with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is
pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are dukkha."
Texts like the
Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta[web 14] and
Anuradha Sutta,
[web 15] show
Buddha
as insisting that the truths about dukkha and the way to end dukkha are
the only ones he is teaching as far as attaining the ultimate goal of
nirvana is concerned.
Within non-Buddhist literature
Hinduism
In
Hindu literature, the earliest
Upaniṣads — the
Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the
Chāndogya — are believed to predate or coincide with the advent of Buddhism.
[e] In these texts' verses, the Sanskrit word
duḥkha (translated below as "suffering" and "distress") occurs only twice. In the
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, it states (in English and Sanskrit):
| English |
Sanskrit |
While we are still here, we have come to know it [ātman].
If you've not known it, great is your destruction.
Those who have known it — they become immortal.
As for the rest — only suffering awaits them.[21] |
ihaiva santo 'tha vidmas tad vayaṃ na ced avedir mahatī vinaṣṭiḥ
ye tad vidur amṛtās te bhavanty athetare duḥkham evāpiyanti[web 16] |
In the
Chāndogya Upaniṣad, it is written:
| English |
Sanskrit |
When a man rightly sees,
he sees no death, no sickness or distress.
When a man rightly sees,
he sees all, he wins all, completely.[22][f]
|
na paśyo mṛtyuṃ paśyati na rogaṃ nota duḥkhatām
sarvaṃ ha paśyaḥ paśyati sarvam āpnoti sarvaśaḥ[web 17]
|
Thus, as in Buddhism, these texts emphasize that one overcomes
duḥkha through the development of a transcendent understanding.
[g]
Panetics
In 1986, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology published an article by
Ralph G.H. Siu entitled
Panetics—The Study of the Infliction of Suffering.
[23] In the abstract for the article, Sui proposed using the term dukkha as a quantitative measurement; he wrote:
After analyzing the unceasing mutual inflictions of suffering by
practically everyone and the neglect of this pervasive and degenerating
human deficiency by the academic community, I urge the immediate
creation of a new and vigorous academic discipline, called panetics, to
be devoted to the study of the infliction of suffering. The nature,
scope, illustrative contents, and social value are outlined. The dukkha
is proposed as a semiquantitative unit of suffering to assist in
associated analytical operations.
Related publications include:
- Panetics: The study of the infliction of suffering. J. Humanistic Psychology 28(3), 6-22. 1988
- The humane chief of state and the Gross National Dukkhas (GND). Panetics 2(2), 1-5. 1993.
- Panetics Trilogy. The International Society for Panetics, 1994.
- Vol. I, Less Suffering for Everybody. Ibid.
- Vol. II, Panetics and Dukkhas. Ibid.
- Vol. III, Seeds of Reflection, Panetic Word Clusters. Ibid
Etymology
The early Western translators of Buddhist texts (prior to the 1970s) translated the Pali term
dukkha
as "suffering" and conveyed the impression that Buddhism was a
pessimistic or world-denying philosophy. Later translators, however,
including Walpola Rahula (
What Buddha Taught, 1974) and nearly
all contemporary translators, have emphasized that "suffering" is too
limited a translation for the term dukkha, and have preferred to either
leave the term untranslated or to clarify that translation with terms
such as unease, anxiety, stress, dissatisfaction, disquietude, etc.
[web 12]
Rupert Gethin explains:
- Rich in meaning and nuance, the word duḥkha is one of the
basic terms of Buddhist and other Indian religious discourse. Literally
'pain' or 'anguish', in its religious and philosophical contexts duḥkha
is, however, suggestive of an underlying sense of 'unsatisfactoriness'
or 'unease' that must ultimately mar even our experience of happiness.
On the deepest level,
dukkha suggests a basic
unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of life because all forms of life
are impermanent and constantly changing.
Dukkha indicates a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.
[web 9]
Sargeant (2009: p. 303) explains the historical roots of
duḥkha and its antonym
sukha:
- It is perhaps amusing to note the etymology of the words sukha
(pleasure, comfort, bliss) and duḥkha (misery, unhappiness, pain). The
ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a
nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or
ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The
word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning "sky," "ether," or "space," was
originally the word for "hole," particularly an axle hole of one of the
Aryan's vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, "having a good axle
hole," while duhkha meant "having a poor axle hole," leading to
discomfort.
According to grammatical tradition,
dukkha is derived from
dus-kha "uneasy", but according to
Monier-Williams more likely a
Prakritized form of
dus-stha "unsteady, disquieted". The Sanskrit prefix 'su' is used as an emphasis suggesting wholesome, high, evolved, desirable, strong and such.
[web 18]
Dukkha was translated as
kǔ (
苦 "bitterness; hardship; suffering; pain") in
Chinese Buddhism, and this
loanword is pronounced
ku (苦) in
Japanese Buddhism and
ko (苦) in
Korean Buddhism, and
khổ in
Vietnamese Buddhism. The Tibetan (phonetic) is
dukngal. In
Shan, it is
[tuk˥kʰaː˥] and in
Burmese, it is
[doʊʔkʰa̰].
Alternate translations
Translations used for dukkha in the context of the four noble truths are:
- A basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all existence (Bhikkhu Bodhi)
- Anguish
- Anxiety (Chogyam Trungpa, The Truth of Suffering, pp. 8–10)
- Affliction (Brazier)
- Dissatisfaction (Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trunpa)
- Discomfort
- Discontent
- Frustration (Dalai Lama, Four Noble Truths, p. 38)
- Misery
- Sorrow
- Stress (Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Jon Kabat-Zin)
- Suffering (Thich Nhat Hanh, Ajahn Succito, Chogyam Trungpa, Rupert Gethin, Dalai Lama, et al.)
- Uneasiness (Chogyam Trungpa)
- Unease (Rupert Gethin)
- Unhappiness
- Unsatisfactoriness (Rupert Gethin; Dalai Lama, Four Noble Truths, p. 38; Piyadassi Thera, The Ancient Path)
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