The sixth Field of Zen Practice is ending Dukkha (this is part of my book, The Ten Fields of Zen Practice: A Primer for Practitioners). While physical and emotional pain, discomfort, and longing are an inevitable part of human life, Dukkha is existential angst we add to such experiences, ranging from subtle uneasiness to acute anguish. It drives our unhealthy or harmful behaviors, so we seek to end Dukkha for the sake of self and others. Buddhism offers a holistic approach to doing this, including maximizing our overall spiritual health and working with our karma. However, Buddhism’s radical teaching is that Dukkha is a symptom of underlying spiritual illness caused by false views – so, through practice, our spiritual illness can be cured, and Dukkha ended.
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The Role of Dukkha in Our Life and Practice
1. The primary purpose of Buddhist practice is to end Dukkha.
2. Dukkha has a range of manifestations from subtle uneasiness to acute anguish.
3. Physical and emotional pain, discomfort, and longing are an inevitable part of human life, while Dukkha is existential angst we add to our experiences.
4. Dukkha is caused by your mental resistance to the way things are.
5. Dukkha is a symptom of underlying spiritual illness that can be cured because the cause of such illness is false views.
The Role of Dukkha in Our Life and Practice
There are seven points I want to make about the role of Dukkha in our life and practice. I will first list them and then explain them:
1. The primary purpose of Buddhist practice is to end Dukkha (Dukkha is a really big deal).
2. Dukkha has a range of manifestations from subtle uneasiness to acute anguish.
3. Physical and emotional pain, discomfort, and longing are an inevitable part of human life, while Dukkha is existential angst we add to our experiences.
4. Dukkha is caused by your mental resistance to the way things are.
5. Dukkha is a symptom of underlying spiritual illness that can be cured because the cause of such illness is false views.
6. Buddhism offers a holistic approach to alleviating Dukkha, including maximizing our overall spiritual health, working with our karma, and curing its ultimate cause.
7. Even when our Dukkha is not extreme, it is a sign of lingering false views, so we continue to pay close attention to it and seek to end it.
To explain more about each point, then:
1. The primary purpose of Buddhist practice is to end Dukkha (Dukkha is a really big deal).
Dukkha is often translated as “suffering,” so if you hear that the purpose of Buddhist practice is to end Dukkha, the statement may sound a little negative. No one has a problem with trying to end suffering, of course – that’s great. But is that all there is to Buddhism? Does Buddhism assume we’re all miserable, and once we’ve overcome most of our misery – or if we never had much misery to begin with – it doesn’t have much to offer us? What about the more noble, exciting-sounding spiritual aspirations like compassion, liberation, or enlightenment?
The thing is, there is much more to Dukkha than first meets the eye. The ending of Dukkha in ways large and small is what results in liberation, enlightenment, and greater compassion. This will hopefully become clear as we explore more about what Dukkha is.
2. Dukkha has a range of manifestations from subtle uneasiness to acute anguish.
Dukkha is translated in many ways: Suffering, dissatisfactoriness, stress, unease, or dis-ease. Because any English word used to stand in for Dukkha is insufficient, I think it’s best to simply use the term “Dukkha” and try to develop a nuanced understanding of it.
Depending on the situation, Dukkha can range from the subtlest of existential angst to anguish acute enough to drive someone to suicide. It can manifest in an infinite number of ways, including ways you might readily identify as “suffering,” like depression or anxiety, but also ways you might consider part of an acceptable background level of mental agitation in your life, like irritability, stress, dissatisfaction, or frustration with relationships. Dukkha can also be so subtle you have to go looking for it if you want to find it, especially if you have a nice life that’s arranged to your liking. In this case it might manifest as a vague sense that life just isn’t quite what it’s meant to be, or that your life will come to its inevitable close before you do what you’re really meant to do.
3. Physical and emotional pain, discomfort, and longing are an inevitable part of human life, while Dukkha is existential angst we add to our experiences.
Buddhism never suggests that spiritual practice can protect you or your loved ones from illness, accident, old age, death, loss, or injustice. Sure – clean living may improve your chances of avoiding or postponing some sources of suffering, but it’s no guarantee (and death gets us all in the end). Inevitably, at some point you will spend time separated from what you love and forced to be near what you don’t love. It’s natural to wish for peace and happiness for yourself, for your loved ones, and for the world, and when peace and happiness is lacking, you will wish you had them.
What does Buddhist practice offer, then? A way to end Dukkha, which is existential angst we add to our experiences. Most people aren’t even aware of it. More accurately, they feel the Dukkha but don’t recognize it for what it is; they just lump their feelings of Dukkha in with their other feelings of pain, discomfort, or longing around a particular subject. Buddhism teaches you to differentiate between your natural, unavoidable stress, discomfort, or pain and the angst you are adding to it. Once you become better able to discern between these experiences, you realize that, in many cases, your Dukkha feels much worse than the unpleasant experience it’s attached to. Not only that, Dukkha can create more Dukkha, creating an ongoing cycle of stress and suffering that can continue long after the original stimulus has passed.
The best description of Dukkha I know of is from the Pali Canon. In the Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow, the Buddha explains:
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental.”[i]
In this passage, the Buddha speaks of the first arrow as physical, while the second arrow – which I like to say we stab ourselves with – is mental. However, the first arrow can easily be mental as well – an experience of mental or emotional stress, discomfort, or pain caused by something you encounter in life. The second arrow, however (or, as my students like to say, the third or fourth or fifth arrow) is always inflicted by your own mind. I call these “Dukkha arrows” existential angst because they are inevitably self-centered – worries about the well-being, satisfaction, or survival of the “I” and all you identify with.
Amazingly, your first-arrow pain might be quite excruciating but somehow still be okay, like overwhelming grief when you lose a loved one. It’s possible to feel first-arrow pain in a way that feels simple, clean, appropriate, or even transformative, especially when the source of the pain is not ongoing. In contrast, Dukkha takes up unhappy residence in your body and mind, resulting – to a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstances – in emotional turmoil, physical tension, mental obsession, and bodily upset.
4. Dukkha is caused by your mental resistance to the way things are.
All manifestations of Dukkha, no matter the severity, are caused by your mental resistance to the way things are – or, at least, to the way you perceive them to be. You compound your basic (first arrow) experience of dis-ease, stress, discomfort, or pain with thoughts that perpetuate themselves, thus intensifying and prolonging your uncomfortable situation: Things shouldn’t be this way. Why me? What is going to happen to me? This is unfair. This is unacceptable. This is stupid. How dare they? They hate me. They are out to get me. Does this mean I am not who I thought I was? Does this mean I have lost control? Should I be fearful because the world is an unpredictable and dangerous place? I shouldn’t feel this way. If I ignore this problem, it will just go away.
You can resist your situation by lamenting it (as if some authority might hear your laments and come fix things out of mercy), formulating arguments (as if you can convince that authority to fix things), trying to make sense of things (as if life is a puzzle, and all discomfort will end if you solve it), ignoring things (as if your lack of acknowledgement will make all problems vanish), or fighting things (as if your frantic or aggressive activity will magically fix even those things that have already happened, or prevent that which is beyond your control).
When trying to understand the nature of Dukkha, it’s incredibly important to realize that when you are faced with difficulty, it’s entirely possible to take action to improve your situation without the mental resistance that causes Dukkha. You can – at least in theory – calmly evaluate what’s going on, make a plan, and take action without the addition of an internal, “Nooooo!”
Common to all your Dukkha-causing thoughts and attitudes is the delusion that your internal mental resistance is critical to your safety and well-being, or even to your very existence. You may or may not be conscious of this delusion, but part of you is convinced that if you accept or make peace with your situation, you will be giving in to opposing forces and will be overwhelmed by whatever it is you fear. Whether – deep down – you fear chaos, death, pain, illness, loss, isolation, injustice, betrayal, attack, humiliation, deprivation, annihilation, or perceiving the universe – or yourself – as a meaningless void, you cling to your mental resistance as crucial to your ability to keep the threat at bay. It may sound ridiculous to assert that you cause yourself Dukkha because you think you can control the world with your mind, but your mental resistance is based in a powerful drive to protect yourself and your loved ones. You’ve got to try something, right?
5. Dukkha is a symptom of underlying spiritual illness that can be cured because the cause of such illness is false views.
A useful analogy for the role of Dukkha in your life and practice is to think of it as a symptom of an underlying spiritual illness, and the cause of that illness is at least one false view. Using the analogy of a cold, the unpleasant sensations of Dukkha would be like your clogged head and runny nose, the mental resistance causing Dukkha would be like your body’s effort to fight a cold by producing mucus, and false views would be the invading virus. Of course, this analogy doesn’t entirely fit because your body’s production of mucus during a cold is helpful in fighting off a virus, while your mental resistance to reality doesn’t do anything but increase your stress and misery. In this respect, a more accurate analogy would be an autoimmune disorder, where your mental resistance would be the body attacking itself and Dukkha would be the physical difficulties that causes. Removing the cause of the autoimmune response would be correcting your false view.
At the root of your Dukkha, then, are false views. These are what cause you to mentally resist reality, or to perceive or interpret reality in distorted or inaccurate ways, provoking your resistance. There are an infinite number of false views you can hold. Most are not rational, and the ones that cause you the most Dukkha are usually those you’re not even conscious of holding! Here is a sample of views which can trigger your mental resistance and therefore cause Dukkha:
- There is something inherently wrong with you.
- There is something inherently wrong with other people (they can’t be trusted, or they’re out to get you).
- If you work really hard, or if you try to be a really good person, you will always be safe, insulated from misfortune.
- If you let go of your mental map of reality, you will fall into a void or cease to exist.
- If you can only figure out how to communicate your needs to your loved ones, they will meet those needs and you’ll be happy.
- The life choices you have made require you to carry a burden of shame.
Curing your spiritual illness, addressing the underlying cause of your Dukkha, first requires you to uncover your false view. Of course, it’s rarely a single, isolated view; it usually relates to other false views. But still, it’s very valuable when you discover a view that’s causing you Dukkha. Buddhism promises us that if the view is causing Dukkha, it is false. Remember, there’s a difference between first-arrow pain and Dukkha. For example, you may feel pain or distress when you think, “There is much injustice in the world!” There is lots of injustice in the world, and it’s natural you should feel distress on account of it and want to help change things. However, you could add Dukkha to this, based on a view that the world should not have ended up this way – as if this life came with a set of contractual promises about universal peace and justice, and it turns out you’ve been lied to. Note that you can let go of your resistance to how things have turned out while wholeheartedly working to improve the world.
After you identify a view that is causing you Dukkha, you investigate it and question it. Is it true? Where did you get the view? What are the consequences of holding the view? What assumptions are the view based on? Sometimes a view you uncover will seem so obviously false you will be able to drop it immediately, like a butterfly shedding its cocoon. This can relieve much Dukkha. Other times, you won’t be entirely convinced the view is false, but you’ll realize it’s causing you so much misery you’d be better off without it, and you’ll be able to experiment with what it’s like to live that way. Sometimes you will see the view clearly, but you can’t let go of it yet. Then it becomes a koan for you to lean into, keeping in mind that if the view is causing Dukkha, it is false. What is true?
The ultimate false view – the one on which all our other views depend – is that you have a separate, independent, autonomous, inherent self-nature. When you recognize this view as false, many other false views will come tumbling down as well. However, your sense of inherent self-nature is very tenacious, and you can hang on to it in subtle ways even after you have debunked it in obvious ones. Many aspects of our practice are aimed at helping you awaken to the true nature of self and thereby liberate yourself from Dukkha.
That’s it for today. I will be back soon with part 2, in which I’ll discuss the sixth and seventh points I want to make about Dukkha: 6. Buddhism offers a holistic approach to alleviating Dukkha, including maximizing our overall spiritual health, working with our karma, and curing its ultimate cause. I will talk about the “how to” of these three approaches. Then I will talk about point 7: Even when our Dukkha is not extreme, it is a sign of lingering false views, so we continue to pay close attention to it and seek to end it.
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[i] “Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow” (SN 36.6), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.than.html .
