Satipatthana 3 - What Is Suffering?

This session explores dukkha, usually translated as suffering, because the reason we practice is to relieve suffering. This Dharma Talk is the third in a multi-session course introducing the Satipatthana Sutta, the Establishments of Mindfulness teaching offered by the Buddha 2600 years ago. The course covers the entire teaching in small, simple steps and was taught to a live class on Zoom in 2021.

Transcript

Today we are diving into dukkha,

The word often translated as suffering from the Buddhist tradition.

We're in the beginning of our exploration of the Satipatthana Sutta,

The four establishments of mindfulness it's sometimes called.

And I don't believe this word shows up early in the sutta.

It's at the core of the Buddha's teachings and last week or the week before there were some questions about this word of what does that even mean?

And I realized okay,

Before we go any further let's unpack this today because the Buddha said many times,

I teach one thing and one thing only,

Suffering and the end of suffering.

So dukkha and the end of dukkha or actually the cessation of dukkha is usually how it's worded.

So I sent out a few quotes this week.

Oh yay,

They worked in the chat box.

But before we read those,

Although I've pasted them,

I wanted to just give a little etymology,

A little history of the term.

So Pali is basically what was spoken at the Buddha's time and it's the language that the sutras,

The discourses sutras were recorded and passed down orally through the Theravada tradition.

Sri Lanka,

Thailand,

Burma are primarily the places where this is still alive and so it's very similar but not the same as Sanskrit,

The religious,

The holy language that I don't believe it was ever actually spoken and I've heard it referred to like modern Italian or Italian versus Latin is the Pali Sanskrit relationship.

Probably not entirely accurate but at least it gives a ballpark picture of it.

If you understand one,

You're probably going to catch a lot of pieces of the other and some words will be the same but some will be different.

So dukkha,

D-u-k-k-h-a is the same in Pali and Sanskrit but then you'll see words like nirvana with the r is Sanskrit and nibbana with two b's is Pali but you can tell that it's a similar word.

So just to say as we go along,

I'll mostly be going to the Pali but sometimes play with both.

So dukkha is the same word in Sanskrit and Pali and it's translated as suffering,

Sorrow,

Dissatisfaction,

Difficulty and to understand dukkha we also have to know its corollary of sukka which is translated usually as contentment so the su is good and the du is bad basically and ka is actually an old word from the Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India.

They were nomadic people,

They traveled in carts and so the ka means a lot of things but it was originally used as the hole in the axle of the wheel or the hole for the axle in the wheel and so the good ka is like a smooth axle wheel and the bad ka,

The dukkha is like a bumpy axle wheel.

So if you can imagine yourself 2,

600 years ago in a cart with a bumpy axle hole,

That's where the word dukkha comes from and so as much as yeah that would be pretty uncomfortable.

It has a different quality than I think a lot of people have or connotation to the word suffering.

That kind of sounds more intense and maybe more personal whereas what is often meant is to refer to the bumpiness of life.

Sometimes how I think of it and I just think it's always important that I'll even use the word suffering sometimes as a translation but to know that actually what is meant goes from very subtle,

Very ordinary everyday difficulty just that there is difficulty in life is another way of translating this that it's part of the package.

It doesn't mean that everything is misery.

That's a gross misinterpretation of Dharma but if you enjoy an analogy or images then this bumpy axle hole,

Things that lead to discomfort is really what's being pointed to.

And so I offered three different passages.

I wonder if anyone will be willing to read the first quote from Thich Nhat Hanh and the Heart of the Buddha's teaching,

One of his ways of looking at dukkha and just using the word suffering.

Is anyone willing to read for us out loud?

Izumi,

Thank you.

Nancy,

You can go next for the second one.

Without suffering you cannot grow.

Without suffering you cannot get the peace and joy you deserve.

Please don't run away from your suffering.

Embrace it and cherish it.

With understanding and compassion you will be able to heal the wounds in your heart and the wounds in the world.

The Buddha called suffering a holy truth because our suffering has a capacity of showing us the path to liberation.

Embrace your suffering and let it reveal to you the way to peace.

Thay,

From chapter one of the Heart of the Buddha's teachings.

Thank you.

So this is not a dictionary definition.

This is why it's important to understand,

To look at dukkha.

So I imagine that a number of you have probably read this before.

It's not a new concept and yet over the years I know I'm not the only one I'm sure who sometimes has sort of felt,

Well let's focus on suffering.

And yet in this beautiful passage from Thay,

He's pointing out,

Well we do tend to run away from suffering and so we cannot learn from it if we're avoiding it.

So we need help to be able to turn towards difficulty in order to learn and grow and heal.

And sometimes we have spontaneous moments where any resistance just drops away.

It's not that we cannot come to this wisdom without teachings and training,

But usually we only catch a little bit of it.

Sort of in these,

Who knows why.

There was this one day where suddenly I stopped resisting and you know there's some sort of healing that happened,

But with these teachings and the practices we can be much more consistent in our capacity to then go,

Oh wait a minute I'm avoiding suffering.

Okay.

And in the Satipa Tana Sutta,

All these mindfulness practices are as much about showing up and being alive to everything,

Which is hard to do when there is dukkha.

So dukkha is not going to be everything,

But we need the extra training and the extra help that the Satipa Tana is one of the ways that we can really train ourselves beautifully to just like the anchor image of like,

It's not that we have to stay rigidly fixated upon dukkha,

But when it comes we can be with it,

With this fluidity.

And so if,

I don't know if folks caught this,

But Thich Nhat Hanh sometimes likes to translate the noble truths as the holy truths because Arya translates to noble,

But why not translate it to holy also?

So for those who are familiar with the Buddhist teachings,

There's this core teaching of the four noble truths and Thay likes to sometimes call them the holy truths,

Which kind of again ennobles this practice.

And like I said,

It's not always going to be named,

But as we study the Satipa Tana Sutta,

The establishments of mindfulness,

This last phrase of embracing your suffering,

Let it reveal to you the way of peace.

That's going to infuse a lot of our practice.

So Nancy,

Could you read the next paragraph?

This is from Lama Surya Das.

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 Buddha's point of view,

This is not a judgment of life's joys and sorrows.

This is a simple down to earth matter of fact description.

Thank you,

Nancy.

So I wanted to bring this in particularly because of that last sentence,

Whether we realize it or not,

Most of us receive the difficulties in life as judgments,

As condemnation,

As whether divinely or materialistically imposed,

We did something wrong.

If only we had figured something else out,

We could have avoided this.

Why is this happening to me?

We take it personally and of course it hurts.

Yet the Buddha is inviting us to this different relationship with the difficulties in life of this is part of the package.

And that's not to say that we don't speak out against injustice,

But in the very moment of our inner experience,

If we are resisting the suffering,

The difficulty,

Quite frankly,

We have no energy usually left over to respond skillfully and perhaps to make change on a social level.

That inner,

Oh,

Why is this happening to me?

Or,

Oh my God,

When is this going to stop?

Or I'm just,

I'm won't even go there.

That takes up so much of our energy.

So it's by no means about passivity.

It's about freeing the inner state from all the energy that usually goes to resisting the difficult.

And it's quite phenomenal what can emerge when we're not caught fighting the way things are internally.

And so that leads,

I don't know if anyone has seen this last,

Suffering equals pain times resistance.

Shenzhen Young is a meditation teacher.

Has anyone heard of this before or seen this equation?

A few folks,

Not a lot.

So I just,

It's so succinct.

Pain in some way,

I think he's using it as the inevitable difficulties that is going to happen in life.

But the degree to which we resist it equals how much suffering we experience,

How much the dukkha.

And if I remember,

My math well enough,

And if I remember the nuances of this is that in math,

Anything times zero equals zero.

So there can be a lot of distress and root unavoidable pain.

And when there's no resistance,

It's possible to not experience the dukkha of it.

And then we have lots of energy to take care.

Much harder done than said,

And yet in having this sort of framework,

This strategy,

This waypointed out,

It tends to be much easier than if not.

And so yeah,

Izumi brings in the story of the second arrow perfectly.

It's just another way of saying this that the first arrow is like,

Yeah,

Or getting shot by a dart or an arrow,

It's going to hurt.

I mean,

That's,

Of course,

It's painful.

But if we fret and resist it,

The internal experience becomes magnified exponentially as if a second arrow hit the same spot.

And so it's,

That's the Buddha's image.

And so this,

The Buddha's image of the arrows doesn't actually go so far as Shinzen's statement.

And,

You know,

It's up to really all of us to see for ourselves.

I have had moments,

I think we spoke about this a little while back of,

You know,

Complete lack of resistance,

Complete non aversion to pain is so transformative,

It's almost unfathomable.

And the pain actually has space to release itself when it's not being resisted,

The resistance actually amplifies it,

Perpetuates it,

But it doesn't seem like there's anything personal or effortful happening.

So there's this fine dance of,

It's not about blaming ourselves when we experience dukkha,

But okay,

What's happening here?

And what aspects can I affect?

What aspects do I have some agency over?

And as much energy as can go inwardly to what could be called accept or experience fully,

Experience the situation as opposed to resist things as they are,

Is this transformative,

Almost mystically miraculous situation where when the resistance is dropped,

Often the first arrow almost,

It's like,

Oh,

It can fall out now.

It doesn't mean that we put ourselves in the path of arrows being shot.

That's not wise for us or for the archer.

We don't want to enable someone else's bad karma to be built up is one way of looking at it.

We don't want to injure ourselves intentionally.

But if we've been shot,

This checking,

If I added a second or 10th arrow,

Where's the inner resistance that is amplifying the already present dukkha?

It is much of the invitation in the reason that we study and pay attention to this term.

So imagine that plenty of you have experiences with dukkha and also,

You know,

This play of resistance and emotional physical pain,

Or different ways of understanding this works.

I know some of you have done lots of studies and experiences in many traditions.

So I'm going to pause my sharing here.

And we'll invite,

Listen to a few sounds of the bell and open it up to hear community reflections on dukkha.

IONS.

The cIPfemale.

.

Reviews

A great talk examining the connection of Buddhist mindfulness foundations - including some language differences between pali and Sanskrit and what actually dukha means. Thank you, Melina Bondy!

This is a fantastic , uncomplicated, enlightening discussion of why it is important to sit with (not avoid) dukkha or suffering. Thank you!