Zen-ish Thoughts About Suffering

In the First Noble Truth, Buddha said that "Life is duḥkha". This has been mistranslated with great staying power as, "Life is suffering". Modern scholars tell us that the Pāli word duḥkha has no one-word equivalent in English. It indicates the wide range of discomforts from minor dissatisfactions to extreme anguish.

We are told that Buddha had disease, disability, and death as his prime motivators, but even so, once we read the rest of his teachings, we see that the intent here must not have been to say that life is nothing but duḥkha. Rather, the balance of the Four Noble Truths and of his teachings as a whole gives the cause of duḥkha, and how to live a life in which it is minimized, and ultimately replaced with nirvāna.

You might have heard that Buddha / Buddhism says the cause of all suffering is illusion or desire, and therefore, all illusion and desire should be shunned. Like the too-simple translation of duḥkha, this too is a misrepresentation. For example, in one parable we see that Buddha considers that being shot with an arrow causes non-illusory suffering, and that desiring not be shot with an arrow is perfectly reasonable.

What he points out in that parable and elsewhere is that after one is literally or metaphorically shot with an arrow, one can and most often does make it worse with thoughts ranging from "Why me?" to "Of course this happened to me!" This optional, self-inflicted, additional, "second arrow" suffering is to be avoided, along with the illusion that it is an inseparable part of the original injury.

Illusion is always a detriment to be avoided. Desire comes in two forms. Desiring to help others is good. Desiring to control others is not, even if you think it is for their own good. Desiring to eat is good. Too much desire to eat is not. Buddhist monks and nuns desire to attain enlightenment, to help others attain enlightenment, and to do a good job on their monasterial duties in the meantime. They are not desire-free. They have good desires.

Buddha teaches that when we do not have something we desire, we are dissatisfied, distressed. But once we have the object of our desire, we fear losing it, or want more of it, or want something else, so ironically, having what we desire, we still suffer distress. Since desiring is associated with suffering both when it is and when it is not fulfilled, Buddha advises us that desiring is a bad idea if one wants to minimize suffering.

But notice the implicit contradiction! To have the goal of minimizing suffering is to desire that goal. There is no escape from the too-naive idea of shunning all desire, and we are left with having to choose which are the best desires to cultivate and which ones are best diminished.

Oh, so you mean it takes careful, well-informed judgment that we won't always get right? Yes. And we'll have to keep trying and observing and trying again, making incremental improvement punctuated with missteps? Yes. So … it's hard and takes time, and changes over time? Yes. Yuck.

The stuff between minor annoyance and extreme anguish is the hardest stuff to deal with. How can we select which desires to diminish, and which to cultivate, and to what extent? Judgment is so much harder than blindly following absolute, naive, and misguided rules. But even though judgment is required, it's not really that mysterious. People often say they don't know what to do in a morally challenging situation, but the truth is we almost always know what to do. The struggle is usually not in the knowing, but in the doing. That said, sometimes we really don't know which next step is most right, or even most likely to produce a favorable pragmatic outcome. Life is hard. Or, as Buddha said, "life is duḥkha". Life is not only hard / duḥkha, but there is no life without duḥkha.

What are some forms of duḥkha in your life that are troublesome for you now? What are some desires you should be diminishing? What are some desires you should be cultivating and gratifying, and how do you assess if you are taking one too far? What are some semi-transparent illusions you see but still tolerate? What are some forms of duḥkha you have had in the past but no longer have? What did you do that keeps those bits of duḥkha in the past and no longer here with you in the present? What have you accomplished? What else will you accomplish?

Illusion is always a detriment to be avoided. Desire comes in two forms. Desiring to help others is good. Desiring to control others is not, even if you think it is for their own good. Desiring to eat is good. Too much desire to eat is not. Buddhist monks and nuns desire to attain enlightenment, to help others attain enlightenment, and to do a good job on their monasterial duties in the mean time. They are not desire-free. They have good desires.

Buddha teaches that when we do not have something we desire, we are dissatisfied, distressed. But once we have the object of our desire, we fear losing it, or want more of it, or want something else, so ironically, having what we desire, we still suffer distress. Since desiring is associated with suffering both when it is and when it is not fulfilled, Buddha advises us that desiring is a bad idea if one wants to minimize suffering.

But notice the implicit contradiction! To have the goal of minimizing suffering is to desire that goal. There is no escape from the too-naive idea of shunning all desire, and we are left with having to choose which are the best desires to cultivate and which ones are best diminished.

The stuff between minor annoyance and extreme anguish is the hardest stuff to deal with. How can we select which desires to diminish, and which to cultivate, and to what extent? Judgment is so much harder than blindly following absolute, naive, and misguiding rules.

But even though judgment is required, it's not really that mysterious. People often say they don't know what to do in a morally challenging situation, but the truth is we almost always know what to do. The struggle is usually not in the knowing, but in the doing. That said, sometimes we really don't know which next step is most right, or even most likely to produce a favorable pragmatic outcome. Life is hard. Or, as Buddha said, "life is duḥkha". Life is not only hard / duḥkha, but there is no life without duḥkha.