I agree this is pretty sinister and empty. Traditional samsara includes some pretty danged nice places (the heavens), not just things that have Earth-like quantities or qualities of flourishing; so rejecting all of that sounds very anti-life.
Some complicating factors:
It’s not clear (to put it lightly) what parinirvana (post-death nirvana / escape from samsara) entails. Some early Buddhists seem to have thought of it as more like oblivion/cessation; others seem to have thought of it as more like perfectly blissful experience.
(Obviously, this becomes more anti-life when you get rid of supernaturalism—then the only alternative to ‘samsara’ is oblivion. But the modern Buddhist can retreat to various mottes about what ‘nirvana’ is, such as embracing living nirvana (sopadhishesa-nirvana) while rejecting parinirvana.)
The Buddhists have a weird psychological theory according to which living in samsara inherently sucks. Liking or enjoying things is really just another species of bad.
The latter view is still pretty anti-life, but notably, it’s a psychological claim (‘this is what it’s really like to experience things’), not a normative claim that we should reject life a priori. If a Buddhist updates away from thinking everything is dukkha, they aren’t necessarily required to reject life anymore—the life-rejection wasn’t was contingent on the psych theory.
There are also versions of the psychological theory in which dukkha is not associated with all motivation, just the craving-based system, which is in a sense “extra”; it’s a layer on top of the primary motivation system, which would continue to operate even if all craving was eliminated. Under that model (which I think is the closest to being true), you could (in principle) just eliminate the unpleasant parts of human motivation, while keeping the ones that don’t create suffering—and probably get humans who were far more alive as a result, since they would be far more willing to do even painful things if pain no longer caused them suffering.
Pain would still be a disincentive in the same way that a reinforcement learner would generally choose to take actions that brought about positive rather than negative reward, but it would make it easier for people to voluntarily choose to experience a certain amount of pain in exchange for better achieving their values afterwards, for instance.
Related to this (?) is the notion that ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ are separate systems. For instance, from a random paper:
Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine. The incentive-sensitization theory posits the essence of drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’. This is due to long-lasting changes in dopamine-related motivation systems of susceptible individuals, called neural sensitization.
In this perspective, a philosophy can say that ‘wanting’ is psychologically unhealthy while ‘liking’ is fine. I’m not sure if this is what Buddhists actually believe, but it is how I’ve interpreted notions like “desire leads to suffering”, “letting go”, “ego death”, etc.
There’s that, but I think it would also be misleading to say that (all) Buddhists consider desire/wanting to be bad! (Though to be clear, it does seem like some of them do.)
I also sometimes wonder whether it would help to distinguish more cleanly and explicitly between caring and clinging as different dimensions of experience. I, at least, have found it clarifying (who knows if it’s exegetically accurate) to think of the Buddha as centrally advocating that you let go of clinging, as understood above; and of many contemporary Buddhist practices and ideas as oriented towards this goal. That is, the aim is not, centrally, to care less about anything (though sometimes that’s appropriate too). Rather, the aim (or at least, one aim) is to care differently — without a certain kind of internal, experiential contraction. To untie a certain kind of knot; to let go of a certain type of denial/resistance towards what is or could be; and in doing so, to step more fully into the real world, and into a kind of sanity.
The Buddhists have a weird psychological theory according to which living in samsara inherently sucks. Liking or enjoying things is really just another species of bad
I don’t think this is true, at leas not insofar as it describes the original philosophy. You may be thinking about the first noble truth “The truth of Dukkha”, but Dukkha is not correctly translated as suffering. A better translation is “unsatisfactoriness”. For example, even positive sensations are Dukkha, according to the Buddha. I think the intention of the first noble truth is to say that worldly sensations, positive and negative, are inherently unsatisfactory.
The Buddha has also said pretty explicitly that a great happiness can be achieved through the noble path, which seems to directly contradict the idea that life inherently sucks, and that suffering can be overcome.
(However, there may be things he’s said that support the quote; I’m definitely not claiming to have a full or even representative view.)
I don’t think this is true, at leas not insofar as it describes the original philosophy. You may be thinking about the first noble truth “The truth of Dukkha”, but Dukkha is not correctly translated as suffering. A better translation is “unsatisfactoriness”. For example, even positive sensations are Dukkha, according to the Buddha. I think the intention of the first noble truth is to say that worldly sensations, positive and negative, are inherently unsatisfactory.
Bhikkhu Bodhi: In the Pali suttas, the discourses of the Buddha, the word dukkha is used in at least three senses. One, which is probably the original sense of the word dukkha and was used in conventional discourse during the Buddha’s time, is pain, particularly painful bodily feelings. The Buddha also uses the word dukkha for the emotional aspect of human existence. There are a number of synonyms that comprise this aspect of dukkha: soka, which means sorrow; aryadeva, which is lamentation; dolmenasa, which is sadness, grief, or displeasure; and upayasa, which is misery, even despair. The deepest, most comprehensive aspect of dukkha is signified by the term samkara-dukkha, which means the dukkha that is inherent in all conditioned phenomena simply by virtue of the fact that they are conditioned.
Followed by:
Konin Cardenas: In the Zen tradition, dukkha is often translated as “suffering,” although more often it means dissatisfaction or the nagging sense that something is off, or sometimes even existential angst. It seems that dukkha is discussed more explicitly in American Zen than it commonly has been elsewhere in the Zen world. In my experience, Japanese Zen tends to assume that people come to practice seeking enlightenment—I can’t think of a single time I heard the word “dukkha” used during my Japanese training.
I could buy that early Buddhists were using a word that basically meant ‘suffering’ or ‘pain’ metaphorically, but what’s the argument that this wasn’t the original word meaning at all? (I’m not a specialist on this topic, I’m just wary of ‘rationalizing’ tendencies for modern readers to try to retranslate concepts in ways that make them sound more obvious/intuitive/modern.)
The Buddha has also said pretty explicitly that a great happiness can be achieved through the noble path, which seems to directly contradict the idea that life inherently sucks, and that suffering can be overcome.
If you think great happiness can be achieved through the Noble Path and you should leave samsara anyway, that’s an even more extreme anti-life position, because you’re rejecting the best life has to offer.
I do agree that Buddhism claims you can get tons of great conventional bliss-states on the road to nirvana (see also the potential to reincarnate in the various heavens); but then it rejects those too, modulo the complications I noted in my upthread comment.
I 100% grant that you can find people, including Buddhist scholars, who will translate dukkha that way. I would generally trust Wikipedia to get a reasonable consensus on this, but in this case, it is also inconsistent, e.g. this quote from the article about Buddhism
The truth of dukkha is the basic insight that life in this mundane world, with its clinging and craving to impermanent states and things[53] is dukkha, and unsatisfactory.[55][66][web 1] Dukkha can be translated as “incapable of satisfying,”[web 5] “the unsatisfactory nature and the general insecurity of all conditioned phenomena”; or “painful.”[53][54] Dukkha is most commonly translated as “suffering,” but this is inaccurate, since it refers not to episodic suffering, but to the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of temporary states and things, including pleasant but temporary experiences.[note 9] We expect happiness from states and things which are impermanent, and therefore cannot attain real happiness.
Duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/; Sanskrit:दुःख; Pāli: dukkha) is an important concept in Hinduism and Buddhism, commonly translated as “suffering”, “unhappiness”, “pain”, “unsatisfactoriness” or “stress”.[1][2][3][4][5][6] It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life.
I guess I have a strong opinion on this much like someone could have a strong opinion on what the bible says about abortion even if there are scholars on both sides. My main point is that [the idea that there is a path to overcome suffering in this life] is * not * a western invention. The Buddha may have also talked about rebirth and karma and stuff, but he has made this much clear at several points in pretty direct language, and he even talked about lasting happiness that can be achieved through the noble path. (I know he e.g. endorsed the claim that this kind of happiness has “no drawbacks”). Bottom line, I think it requires a very tortured reading of his statements to reconcile this with the idea that life on earth is necessarily negative well-being.
There’s also the apparent contradiction in just the noble truths (“the truth of dukkha”, “the origin of dukkha”, “the end of dukkha”, “the path to the end of dukkha”) because (1) is usually phrased as “dukkha is an inherent part of the world”, which would then contradict (3), unless you read (3) as only referring to the end via escaping the cycle of rebirth (which again I don’t think can be reconciled with what the Buddha actually said). It’s annoying, but you have to read dukkha as referring to different things if you want to make sense of this.
If you think great happiness can be achieved through the Noble Path and you should leave samsara anyway, that’s an even more extreme anti-life position, because you’re rejecting the best life has to offer.
Agreed. (And I would agree that this is more than enough reason not to defend original Buddhism as a philosophy without picking and choosing.)
It makes sense to me to use dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness” because it emphasizes that the issue is resisting the way things are or needing things to be different.
I think it makes Buddhism higher-probability to translate dukkha that way. This on its own doesn’t immediately make me confident that the original doctrines had that in mind.
For that, I’d want to hear more from Pāli experts writing articles that discuss standard meanings for dukkha at the time, and asks questions like “If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?) rather than some clearer term? Were there no clearer options available?”
If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?) rather than some clearer term?
Note that Wikipedia gives the word’s etymology as being something that actually does seem pretty analogous to ‘not totally satisfactory’;
The word is commonly explained as a derivation from Aryan terminology for an axle hole, referring to an axle hole which is not in the center and leads to a bumpy, uncomfortable ride. According to Winthrop Sargeant,
The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning “sky,” “ether,” or “space,” was originally the word for “hole,” particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan’s vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, “having a good axle hole,” while duhkha meant “having a poor axle hole,” leading to discomfort.[12]
The word dukkha is made up of the prefix du and the root kha. Du means “bad” or “difficult”. Kha means “empty”. “Empty”, here, refers to several things—some specific, others more general. One of the specific meanings refers to the empty axle hole of a wheel. If the axle fits badly into the center hole, we get a very bumpy ride. This is a good analogy for our ride through saṃsāra.
As I heard one meditation teacher put it, the modern analogy to this would be if you had one of those shopping carts where one of the wheels is stuck and doesn’t quite go the way you’d like it—doesn’t exactly kill you or cause you enormous suffering, but it’s not a totally satisfactory shopping cart experience, either.
I find arguments by analogy etymology almost maximally unconvincing here, unless dukkha was a neologism? Like, those arguments make me update away from your conclusion, because they seem so not-of-the-correct-type. Normally, word etymologies are a very poor guide to meaning compared to looking at usage—what do other sources actually mean when they say “dukkha” in totally ordinary contexts?
There’s a massive tradition across many cultures of making sophistical arguments about words’ ‘true’ or ‘real’ meaning based on (real or imagined) etymologies. This is even dicier when the etymology is as vague/uninformative as this one—there are many different ways you can spin ‘bad axle hole’ to give exactly opposite glosses of dukkha.
I still don’t find this 100% convincing/exacting, but the following account at least doesn’t raise immediate alarm bells for me:
According to Pali-English Dictionary, dukkha (Sk. duḥkha) means unpleasant, painful, causing misery.[4] [...]
The other meaning of the word dukkha, given in Venerable Nyanatiloka written Buddhist Dictionary, is “ill”. As the first of the Four Noble Truths and the second of the three characteristics of existence (tilakkhaṇa), the term dukkha is not limited to painful experience (as “pain”, “painful feeling”, which may be bodily and mental), but refers to the unsatisfactory nature and the general insecurity of all conditioned phenomena which, on account of their impermanence, are all liable to suffering, and this includes also pleasurable experience. Hence “unsatisfactoriness” or “liability to suffering” would be more adequate renderings, if not for stylistic reasons.[6] Therefore, it can be said that dukkha is the lack of satisfaction.
Our modern words are too specialized, too limited, and usually too strong. Sukha and dukkha are ease and dis-ease (but we use disease in another sense); or wealth and ilth from well and ill (but we have now lost ilth); or wellbeing and ill-ness (but illness means something else in English). We are forced, therefore, in translation to use half synonyms, no one of which is exact. Dukkha is equally mental and physical. Pain is too predominantly physical, sorrow too exclusively mental, but in some connections they have to be used in default of any more exact rendering. Discomfort, suffering, ill, and trouble can occasionally be used in certain connections. Misery, distress, agony, affliction and woe are never right. They are all much too strong & are only mental.[7] As there is no word in English covering the same ground as dukkha does in Pali, I believe, the most appropriate translation equivalent of dukkha could be ‘stress’ (as distress and eustress).
Distress is a term of modern psychology which implies ‘great pain, anxiety, or sorrow; acute physical or mental suffering; affliction or trouble; that which causes pain, suffering, trouble, danger, etc.’ ‘It is state of extreme necessity or misfortune’, liability or exposure to pain, suffering, trouble, etc.; or danger’.[8]
The antonym of dukkha is sukha, which is agreeable, pleasant, blest. In Buddhist usage it is not merely sensual pleasure, it is the happy feeling in ordinary sense. But it is also used to convey an ethical import of doctrinal significance. The concept of dukkha necessarily includes the general insecurity of the whole of our experience.[9]
Using psychological terminology, it can be said that, sukha is the equivalent of eustress, which means a so-called positive tension or ‘good stress’. Eustress is derived from the ‘Greek eu ‘well, good’ + stress’ and means ‘stress that is deemed healthful or giving one the feeling of fulfillment[ ]’[10] or other positive feelings.
[...]
Dukkha in non-Buddhist belief-systems
Two ideas of great significance developed between the ninth and sixth centuries BCE, namely that beings are reincarnated into the world (saṃsāra) over and over again and that the result of action (karma) are reaped in future lives. This process rebirth is one of suffering (duḥkha), escape from which can be achieved through the minimizing of action and through spiritual knowledge. Patañjali (second century BCE), a systematizer of yoga practice and philosophy, states that all is suffering to the spiritually discriminating person (vivekin). This doctrine that all life is suffering is common to renouncer tradition.[13]
[...] Hinduism expects of followers accepting suffering as inevitable and inescapable consequence and as an opportunity for spiritual progress. Thus the soul or true self, which is eternally free of any suffering, may come to manifest itself in the person, who then achieves liberation (moksha).
As I have already mentioned above, that Hinduism is a complex mixture of religious movements. Concerning the relation between Ultimate Reality and evil, there are at least three major perspectives, given by (1) Vedas, (2) Upanishads and the whole corpus of pantheistic writings and (3) Epics and Puranas.
Suffering in Vedas also refers to theory of moral law of cause and effect. [...] In the hymns addressed to Varuna (Vedic god) evil is a matter of humans not fulfilling his laws or not performing the ritual properly. Often it has a moral significance, in that people are evil-minded or commit adultery. Those who commit evil deeds must repent before Varuna and try to repair their evil deeds through ritual sacrifices. In other hymns addressed to Indra, suffering or evil is personified by demons. Thus the fight against evil is a perpetual combat between personalized good and evil forces.[17]
The Upanishads ground a pantheistic perspective on Ultimate Reality and introduce karma as the explanation of evil in the world. Ignorance launches karma into action and karma brings suffering. As the manifestations and dissolutions of the world have no beginning and no end, so is karma, meaning that suffering is a part of the eternal cosmic cycle. Suffering in the present life is the natural consequence of past lives’ ignorance and it has to be endured without questioning.[18]
Hinduism holds that suffering is the fruit of karma, which goes accompanied by the inevitable shadow from personal unwholesome actions in one’s current life or in a past life. The monotheistic faiths must contemplate the problems of suffering, ill or evil within the context of god’s authority and mercy.
[...]
More detailed overview of dukkha [in Buddhism]
More comprehensive overview of what the term dukkha implies, is given in Saccavibhaṅga sutta (An Analysis of the Truths) by Sāriputta:
“Now what, friends, is the noble truth of stress? Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with the unbeloved is stressful; separation from the loved is stressful; not getting what is wanted is stressful. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are stressful.
And what is birth (jāti)? Whatever birth, taking birth, descent, coming-to-be, coming-forth, appearance of aggregates, & acquisition of [sense] spheres of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called birth.
And what is aging (jāra)? Whatever aging, decrepitude, brokenness, graying, wrinkling, decline of life-force, weakening of the faculties of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called aging.
And what is death (maraṇa)? Whatever deceasing, passing away, breaking up, disappearance, dying, death, completion of time, break up of the aggregates, casting off of the body, interruption in the life faculty of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called death.
And what is sorrow (soka)? Whatever sorrow, sorrowing, sadness, inward sorrow, inward sadness of anyone suffering from misfortune, touched by a painful thing, that is called sorrow.
And what is lamentation (parideva)? Whatever crying, grieving, lamenting, weeping, wailing, lamentation of anyone suffering from misfortune, touched by a painful thing, that is called lamentation.
And what is pain (dukkha)? Whatever is experienced as bodily pain, bodily discomfort, pain or discomfort born of bodily contact, that is called pain.
And what is distress (domanassa)? Whatever is experienced as mental pain, mental discomfort, pain or discomfort born of mental contact, that is called distress.
And what is despair (upāyāsa)? Whatever despair, despondency, desperation of anyone suffering from misfortune, touched by a painful thing that is called despair.
And what is the stress of association with the unbeloved? There is the case where undesirable, unpleasing, unattractive sights, sounds, aromas, flavors, or tactile sensations occur to one; or one has connection, contact, relationship, interaction with those who wish one ill, who wish for one’s harm, who wish for one’s discomfort, who wish one no security from the yoke. This is called the stress of association with the unbeloved.
And what is the stress of separation from the loved? There is the case where desirable, pleasing, attractive sights, sounds, aromas, flavors, or tactile sensations do not occur to one; or one has no connection, no contact, no relationship, no interaction with those who wish one well, who wish for one’s benefit, who wish for one’s comfort, who wish one security from the yoke, nor with one’s mother, father, brother, sister, friends, companions, or relatives. This is called the stress of separation from the loved.
And what is the stress of not getting what is wanted (yam pi icchaṃ na labbati)? In beings subject to birth, the wish arises, ‘O, may we not be subject to birth, and may birth not come to us.’ But this is not to be achieved by wanting. This is the stress of not getting what is wanted. In beings subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair, the wish arises, ‘O, may we not be subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow lamentation, pain, distress, & despair, and may aging… illness… death… sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair not come to us.’ But this is not to be achieved by wanting. This is the stress of not getting what is wanted.”[32]
The bailey of dukkha is that it’s really bad—like physical pain. And the older texts seem to generally embrace, indeed presuppose, this bailey—the whole reason these sentences sound radical, revolutionary, concerning, is that they’re saying something not-obvious and seemingly extreme about all ordinary experience. Not that it’s literally physical pain, sure; but there’s a deliberate line being drawn between physical pain, illness, dysfunction, suffering, badness, etc. and many other things.
My intuition is that these lines would have hit very differently if their first-pass meaning in the eyes of Sanskrit- or Pali-speakers had been “Birth isn’t totally satisfying, aging isn’t totally satisfying, death isn’t totally satisfying...”
(I can much more easily buy that ‘physical pain’ is the obvious surface meaning for initiates, the attention-grabbing Buzzfeed headline; and something like ‘not perfectly satisfying’ is the truly-intended motte, meant for people to come to understand later. But in that case the etymology arguments are totally backwards, since etymology relates to common usage and not ‘weird new esoteric meaning our religion is inventing here’.)
If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?
I’m willing to believe, based on the totality of the Buddha’s message, that he meant dukkha as “resisting how things are/wanting them to be different,” i.e. being unsatisfied with reality. Look at our own word “suffering” in English. Today it connotes anguish, but it also means “enduring” or “putting up with.” A word like “unsatisfied” in English has a mild connotation, but we could also say something like “tormented by desire” to ramp up the intensity without fundamentally changing the meaning.
I think even in current english there is an idiom for pain. Ie “”It pains me that I don’t have food” vs “I am hungry”. One variant of the claims is that there is way to be food-poor that is positive “It delights me that I don’t have food” or just “I don’t have food”.
I think it would pretty hard to translate words like “annoying,” “irritating,” etc to a very foreign audience without making reference to physical pain. It’s hard to infer connotations or intensity when looking at those older writings.
I agree this is pretty sinister and empty. Traditional samsara includes some pretty danged nice places (the heavens), not just things that have Earth-like quantities or qualities of flourishing; so rejecting all of that sounds very anti-life.
Some complicating factors:
It’s not clear (to put it lightly) what parinirvana (post-death nirvana / escape from samsara) entails. Some early Buddhists seem to have thought of it as more like oblivion/cessation; others seem to have thought of it as more like perfectly blissful experience.
(Obviously, this becomes more anti-life when you get rid of supernaturalism—then the only alternative to ‘samsara’ is oblivion. But the modern Buddhist can retreat to various mottes about what ‘nirvana’ is, such as embracing living nirvana (sopadhishesa-nirvana) while rejecting parinirvana.)
The Buddhists have a weird psychological theory according to which living in samsara inherently sucks. Liking or enjoying things is really just another species of bad.
The latter view is still pretty anti-life, but notably, it’s a psychological claim (‘this is what it’s really like to experience things’), not a normative claim that we should reject life a priori. If a Buddhist updates away from thinking everything is dukkha, they aren’t necessarily required to reject life anymore—the life-rejection
wasn’twas contingent on the psych theory.There are also versions of the psychological theory in which dukkha is not associated with all motivation, just the craving-based system, which is in a sense “extra”; it’s a layer on top of the primary motivation system, which would continue to operate even if all craving was eliminated. Under that model (which I think is the closest to being true), you could (in principle) just eliminate the unpleasant parts of human motivation, while keeping the ones that don’t create suffering—and probably get humans who were far more alive as a result, since they would be far more willing to do even painful things if pain no longer caused them suffering.
Pain would still be a disincentive in the same way that a reinforcement learner would generally choose to take actions that brought about positive rather than negative reward, but it would make it easier for people to voluntarily choose to experience a certain amount of pain in exchange for better achieving their values afterwards, for instance.
Related to this (?) is the notion that ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ are separate systems. For instance, from a random paper:
In this perspective, a philosophy can say that ‘wanting’ is psychologically unhealthy while ‘liking’ is fine. I’m not sure if this is what Buddhists actually believe, but it is how I’ve interpreted notions like “desire leads to suffering”, “letting go”, “ego death”, etc.
There’s that, but I think it would also be misleading to say that (all) Buddhists consider desire/wanting to be bad! (Though to be clear, it does seem like some of them do.)
I liked this article’s take on the issue.
I don’t think this is true, at leas not insofar as it describes the original philosophy. You may be thinking about the first noble truth “The truth of Dukkha”, but Dukkha is not correctly translated as suffering. A better translation is “unsatisfactoriness”. For example, even positive sensations are Dukkha, according to the Buddha. I think the intention of the first noble truth is to say that worldly sensations, positive and negative, are inherently unsatisfactory.
The Buddha has also said pretty explicitly that a great happiness can be achieved through the noble path, which seems to directly contradict the idea that life inherently sucks, and that suffering can be overcome.
(However, there may be things he’s said that support the quote; I’m definitely not claiming to have a full or even representative view.)
From https://www.lionsroar.com/forum-understanding-dukkha/:
Followed by:
I could buy that early Buddhists were using a word that basically meant ‘suffering’ or ‘pain’ metaphorically, but what’s the argument that this wasn’t the original word meaning at all? (I’m not a specialist on this topic, I’m just wary of ‘rationalizing’ tendencies for modern readers to try to retranslate concepts in ways that make them sound more obvious/intuitive/modern.)
If you think great happiness can be achieved through the Noble Path and you should leave samsara anyway, that’s an even more extreme anti-life position, because you’re rejecting the best life has to offer.
I do agree that Buddhism claims you can get tons of great conventional bliss-states on the road to nirvana (see also the potential to reincarnate in the various heavens); but then it rejects those too, modulo the complications I noted in my upthread comment.
I 100% grant that you can find people, including Buddhist scholars, who will translate dukkha that way. I would generally trust Wikipedia to get a reasonable consensus on this, but in this case, it is also inconsistent, e.g. this quote from the article about Buddhism
backs up what I just said, but from the article about dukkha:
I guess I have a strong opinion on this much like someone could have a strong opinion on what the bible says about abortion even if there are scholars on both sides. My main point is that [the idea that there is a path to overcome suffering in this life] is * not * a western invention. The Buddha may have also talked about rebirth and karma and stuff, but he has made this much clear at several points in pretty direct language, and he even talked about lasting happiness that can be achieved through the noble path. (I know he e.g. endorsed the claim that this kind of happiness has “no drawbacks”). Bottom line, I think it requires a very tortured reading of his statements to reconcile this with the idea that life on earth is necessarily negative well-being.
There’s also the apparent contradiction in just the noble truths (“the truth of dukkha”, “the origin of dukkha”, “the end of dukkha”, “the path to the end of dukkha”) because (1) is usually phrased as “dukkha is an inherent part of the world”, which would then contradict (3), unless you read (3) as only referring to the end via escaping the cycle of rebirth (which again I don’t think can be reconciled with what the Buddha actually said). It’s annoying, but you have to read dukkha as referring to different things if you want to make sense of this.
Agreed. (And I would agree that this is more than enough reason not to defend original Buddhism as a philosophy without picking and choosing.)
It makes sense to me to use dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness” because it emphasizes that the issue is resisting the way things are or needing things to be different.
I think it makes Buddhism higher-probability to translate dukkha that way. This on its own doesn’t immediately make me confident that the original doctrines had that in mind.
For that, I’d want to hear more from Pāli experts writing articles that discuss standard meanings for dukkha at the time, and asks questions like “If by ‘dukkha’ early Buddhists just meant ‘not totally satisfactory’, then why did they choose that word (apparently mainly used for physical pain...?) rather than some clearer term? Were there no clearer options available?”
Note that Wikipedia gives the word’s etymology as being something that actually does seem pretty analogous to ‘not totally satisfactory’;
As I heard one meditation teacher put it, the modern analogy to this would be if you had one of those shopping carts where one of the wheels is stuck and doesn’t quite go the way you’d like it—doesn’t exactly kill you or cause you enormous suffering, but it’s not a totally satisfactory shopping cart experience, either.
(Leigh Brasington also has a fun take.)
I find arguments by
analogyetymology almost maximally unconvincing here, unless dukkha was a neologism? Like, those arguments make me update away from your conclusion, because they seem so not-of-the-correct-type. Normally, word etymologies are a very poor guide to meaning compared to looking at usage—what do other sources actually mean when they say “dukkha” in totally ordinary contexts?There’s a massive tradition across many cultures of making sophistical arguments about words’ ‘true’ or ‘real’ meaning based on (real or imagined) etymologies. This is even dicier when the etymology is as vague/uninformative as this one—there are many different ways you can spin ‘bad axle hole’ to give exactly opposite glosses of dukkha.
I still don’t find this 100% convincing/exacting, but the following account at least doesn’t raise immediate alarm bells for me:
The bailey of dukkha is that it’s really bad—like physical pain. And the older texts seem to generally embrace, indeed presuppose, this bailey—the whole reason these sentences sound radical, revolutionary, concerning, is that they’re saying something not-obvious and seemingly extreme about all ordinary experience. Not that it’s literally physical pain, sure; but there’s a deliberate line being drawn between physical pain, illness, dysfunction, suffering, badness, etc. and many other things.
My intuition is that these lines would have hit very differently if their first-pass meaning in the eyes of Sanskrit- or Pali-speakers had been “Birth isn’t totally satisfying, aging isn’t totally satisfying, death isn’t totally satisfying...”
(I can much more easily buy that ‘physical pain’ is the obvious surface meaning for initiates, the attention-grabbing Buzzfeed headline; and something like ‘not perfectly satisfying’ is the truly-intended motte, meant for people to come to understand later. But in that case the etymology arguments are totally backwards, since etymology relates to common usage and not ‘weird new esoteric meaning our religion is inventing here’.)
I’m willing to believe, based on the totality of the Buddha’s message, that he meant dukkha as “resisting how things are/wanting them to be different,” i.e. being unsatisfied with reality. Look at our own word “suffering” in English. Today it connotes anguish, but it also means “enduring” or “putting up with.” A word like “unsatisfied” in English has a mild connotation, but we could also say something like “tormented by desire” to ramp up the intensity without fundamentally changing the meaning.
I think even in current english there is an idiom for pain. Ie “”It pains me that I don’t have food” vs “I am hungry”. One variant of the claims is that there is way to be food-poor that is positive “It delights me that I don’t have food” or just “I don’t have food”.
I think it would pretty hard to translate words like “annoying,” “irritating,” etc to a very foreign audience without making reference to physical pain. It’s hard to infer connotations or intensity when looking at those older writings.