My First Steps Towards Understanding Dukkha

Two weeks ago at Young Urban Zen we read Chogyam Trungpa’s description of dukkha, and discussed the translation of the word as “suffering”, “dissatisfaction,” “a sense of being off, or not at ease with oneself.”  Much of the conversation afterward centered on how striving is connected to suffering, how non-striving is connected to the cessation of suffering, and what “non-striving” means.   

During this last week, while down with the flu, I’ve been considering dukkha. 

I’m usually concerned with historical contextualization: In an academic paper, I wouldn’t assume that dukkha means the same thing from one century to the next, from one land to the next, or from one Buddhist thinker to the next.  But for this, I’m only concerned with my personal relationship to dukkha. What do I feel it to be when I turn inward?

The first two things I notice: first, in zazen I naturally feel dukkha, the feeling pervades my body: I know dukkha through my body.  Second, I have total faith in the fact of dukkha because I experience it as my body.  And third, I have yet no words to describe what I feel dukkha to be, but I think I may make some progress here.  I find it interesting that, despite not accepting any general translation of dukkha, I still feel that my body knows what it is.  Perhaps this is what often occurs in religion – people end up describing their own somatic experiences of various religious categories, reading heaven and hell, spirits, soul (and even body) through body.  And in turn the categories we utilize shape our somatic experiences.  This brings up all manner of hermeneutical questions for me. 

But before the dukkha I know through zazen, that I feel in my body, the dukkha that I do not feel: not only the standard translation as “suffering,” but the way suffering is typically described.   I’ve been lucky to know Buddhism first hand rather than through text, because text alone may have led me to some serious misunderstandings.  I have also been lucky to have encountered the texts I have encountered early on – Gary Snyder first, then Suzuki Roshi, Dogen, and various Zen texts.  I count myself lucky because the way dukkha  is typically described in many contemporary, popular Buddhist books may have pushed me away rather than pulled me in. 

Even Trungpa, who we read at YUZ: “Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do, life contains dukkha, dissatisfaction, pain.  If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it.  If we suffer in pain, we want to escape it.  We experience dissatisfaction all the time.”  Etc, etc.  If this was my first encounter with Buddhism, I would get the impression that Buddhism was created by unfortunate people who walked around the world in a constant state of anxiety, constantly worried that any pleasure they had would cause them to suffer in the future. 

I imagine a common line-by-line reaction to this description of dukkha would be something like this: “Life contains suffering?  Of course!  But if I have pleasure, I enjoy it, I don’t fear losing it.   I know pleasure is momentary.  And if I’m in pain, I accept it, I deal with it like everyone else.  I don’t try to run from it.  Why obsess over suffering like this?” 

So now back to what I feel in my body – to what I trust – and to what I feel may be a misunderstanding of what is meant by these various translations of dukkha that just never seem to hit the mark.  I know that dukkha is a core part of my being, and of human being, but this core part of human being is not a sense of suffering, or the sense that life is not quite right. It is not the sense that things are slightly off, like an imperfect wheel.  If that was dukkha, human beings would be walking around in a state of existential crisis all the time, but we’re not. 

Dukkha as suffering is not the sense of or experience of suffering.  It is not the sense of things not being quite right.  Dukkha is not an experience of suffering, but as a massive, omnipresent, subterranean fact of human life: that our actions, almost in general, facilitate suffering.  It is a fact that underlies all of our activity.  This suffering is not something we are present to, it is not the suffering that is obvious to all.  Rather, it is the insight that every breath I take – a calm breath, an anxious breath – shapes my organism in some way, as does every thought, every feeling, every perception.  And often this “shaping” is in the form of suffering.  Everything – every activity, such as processing a sound, looking at a bird in a tree, or taking a walk – leaves an impression, on the mind, yes, but also in the organism as a whole.  And dukkha is created, enforced in some particular way, by every subtle action. 

Every subtle action in the orchestra of our lives has some effect on our ease or lack of ease in the world.  Dukkha is the fact that most often, our every action enforces some form of lack of ease, some variety of suffering.  And Buddhism is a way of addressing that fact.   

I rewrote this many times before posting it, and feel I have taken one simple but important step: away from dukkha as any kind of sense or experience of suffering, and towards dukkha as the general fact that our actions, in general, facilitate suffering.  This differentiation is enormously helpful to me, although I imagine it sounds rather underwhelming.  But I feel I know have a better grasp of what is meant by 'suffering,' why that term makes sense, and I feel closer to Buddhism for having thought this out.