Today's Daily Dharma from Tricycle:
Dukkha is Our Best Teacher
Dukkha is our best teacher. It will not be persuaded by any pleading of misery to let go of us. If we may say to a human teacher, “I don't feel well....,” the teacher may reply, "I am very sorry, but if you want to go home, then you must go. If we say to dukkha, "Look, I don't feel well.... I want to go home," dukkha says, "That's fine, but I am coming along." There is no way to say goodbye to it unless and until we have transcended our reactions. This means that we have looked dukkha squarely in the eye and see it for what it is: a universal characteristic of existence and nothing else. The reason we are fooled is that because this life contains so many pleasant occasions and sense contacts, we think if we could just keep this pleasantness going dukkha would never come again. We try over and over again to make this happen, until in the end we finally see that the pleasantness cannot continue because the law of impermanence intervenes.... So we continue our search for something new, because everybody else is doing it too.
~ Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies; from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith.
For many, Dukkha is a rather challenging concept that is generally translated as suffering, but that translation fails to convey the full impact of the Buddha's teachings on the nature of Dukkha. This bit from the Wikipedia entry helps flesh out the full meaning of this central term in Buddhist psychology.
Dukkha is the focus of the Four Noble Truths, which state its nature, its cause, its cessation, and the way leading to its cessation. This way is known as the Noble Eightfold Path. Ancient texts, like Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta and Anuradha Sutta, show Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, as insisting that the truths about dukkha are the only ones he is teaching as far as attaining the ultimate goal of nirvana is concerned.
The Buddha discussed three kinds of dukkha.
- Dukkha-dukkha (pain of pain) is the obvious sufferings of :
- Viparinama-dukkha (pain of alteration) is suffering caused by change:
- violated expectations
- the failure of happy moments to last
- Sankhara-dukkha (pain of formation) is a subtle form of suffering inherent in the nature of conditioned things, including the
- skandhas
- the factors constituting the human mind
It 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, selflessness (no-self). Insofar as it is dynamic, ever-changing, uncontrollable and not finally satisfactory, experience is itself precisely dukkha.[5] 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 such happiness will be secure and lasting.[6]
All of the Buddha's teachings were aimed at understanding the nature of Dukkha and how we can use this as the vehicle to transcend this basic reality of our lives.
Even in Western psychology, we realize that, for most people, no change will ever occur until we recognize the reality of Dukkha, though that term will seldom be used. It takes some form of suffering to generate in most of us the need or desire to understand why and how we are suffering. Only then do we begin to look at our lives and begin the quest for self-transformation.
This may all seem rather pessimistic and depressing, but while Buddhism sees life as inherently comprised of Dukkha, Buddhism also teaches that this is not our true state. We all possess Buddha Nature, the "truly real, but internally hidden, eternal potency or immortal element within the purest depths of the mind, present in all sentient beings, for awakening and becoming a Buddha."
Until we embrace Dukkha as our teacher, we will never be able to access the Buddha Nature within all of us.
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