When the First Noble Truth
is told as “Life is Suffering” most people are unhappy because it
sounds very negative to them.
This is a translation
problem.
The Buddha did not speak
English, French or Chinese. He did not use the word “Suffering”
but “Dukkha”. Unfortunately, we do not have an accurate word to
translate “Dukkha”.
Beside “Suffering” it
is sometimes translated as “Stress” or “Dissatisfaction”.
Actually, these 3 words- concepts - are part of Dukkha, but they do
not fully represent it. So we might as well dump them and use
“Dukkha”.
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| Dukkha |
The Buddha spoke of 3
aspects of Dukkha :
- Dukkha dukkha – Dukkha
of regular Suffering or Pain
- Viparinama dukkha - the
Dukkha caused by Impermanence
- Samkhara dukkha - the
Dukkha of Conditioned Existence
Dukkha dukkha is easy to
understand by most everyone, and it is properly translated in English
by “Pain”, or “Suffering. “ It is the physical pain of a
tooth ache, or the mental pain of losing a loved one.
There are different
interpretations of the next 2 Dukkhas, and I will stick to one only
of them.
Viparinama dukkha is the
dukkha due to Impermanence - the fact that things change.
Example : You
are working in your yard. The outside temperature is in the 80's but
you do not feel hot. You walk inside your home to drink a glass of
water. The AC is running and you stay inside a little to enjoy the
coolness. You get back outside, and immediately feel
uncomfortable because of the heat you experience.
This is Viparinama
Dukkha. The temperature has not changed outside, and you were not
feeling uncomfortable before, but you enjoyed the coolness of the
house, so when you went back outside, it felt too hot to you. So
Viparinama dukkha describes the suffering or dissatisfaction arising
in us when we lose something we were enjoying.
Sankhara Dukkha is said to
be deeper and more subtle, but actually I do not think it very
complicated if you look at it from a certain perspective, Sankhara
Dukkha deals with OUR impermance and the fact that we have to struggle
to stay alive.
What are we really ? We are
an assemblage of living cells trying to stick together. At the moment
of our conception, a sperm and an egg produce a first living cell
which later splits and develops into a fetus by incorporating atoms
brought to it by its mother. At the time of birth we begin to absorb
food and oxygen from the outside world, and grow a bigger body. This
growing of an individual being is one of 2 great trends of the
universe.
One trend organizes,
structures and bring order. The opposite and complimentary trend
disorganizes, dissolves and brings chaos.
A powerful description of
this is the Taoist Yin-Yang theory. Practically it describes
everything is subject to 2 competing and complimentary trends, one
promotes the organization of usually inanimate matter into a well
defined entity separate from the rest of the universe, one trend
tends to the opposite. Matter gets organized into a fawn, the fawn
tries to stay alive, but eventually will die, the molecules that
composed him separate, and will one day become part of an other
creature. Or he could be eaten by a wolf, and part of him will become
part of the wolf. There is a constant flow, it is almost a dance.
Matter gets organized and disorganized constantly.
In the case of human
beings, our evolution as a specie has given us one extremely potent
tool to help us staying alive as individuals : our ego, or sense of
self. Without this very potent tool, it is unlikely that we would
have survived surrounded by the predators that were after us 100,000
years ago. One characteristic of human is their extraordinary will to
live and fight to survive amazingly difficult physical or mental
situations. This is the job of the ego. (And our problem comes from
believing that we ARE this ego - but this is a different story).
So Sankhara Dukkha is the
stress due to our constant trying to keep us alive as an entity,
trying to keep together all molecules that are composing us while the
rest of the universe wants them scattered... We are an assemblage of
a great number of elements, we try – against the rest of the
universe - to keep them together, and it is a constant effort. This
is life itself, this is Sankhara Dukkha.
When you really
look at them, the 3 Dukkha are not that different, They all comes back to impermanence and dependent
origination. But teaching the 3 kinds will help better
understand the 1st noble Truth.
