I want to address a common misconception that I see you having here when you write phrases like:
not many people… are going to remain indifferent about it
“… I can choose to react on them or to ignore them, and I am choosing to ignore this one”
when people feel pain, and a desire to avoid that pain arises…
a person who really has no preference whatsoever
to the level that they actually become indifferent to pain
Importantly, “not being averse to pain,” in the intended sense of the word aversion, does not mean that one is “indifferent to pain,” in the sense of (not) having intentions and preferences. When I speak of “craving” or “aversion,” I am referring to a very specific kind of mental action and experience which results in suffering, not to intentions and preferences. Craving/aversion is the kind of desire which finds the way things presently are fundamentally unacceptable. Craving is like an attempt to grab at sensations and experiences, and aversion is like an attempt to hold them at arm’s length.
So, it isn’t the case that someone who has let go of craving/aversion and therefore suffering is completely indifferent to pain or that they won’t take action to alleviate the pain. If you stab a non-sufferer, they’ll still e.g. go to a hospital and have the wound treated. They’ll still have a general preference for pleasure over pain and take actions in accordance with those preferences; they just won’t seek pleasure or avoid pain in the sense of “I am not ok without this pleasure, or with this pain”—that’s craving and aversion. Pain still serves its important functional role, without the extra mental (re)actions of aversion and suffering.
This is also why I prefer to use terms like craving, aversion, and clinging to terms like “desire.” Sometimes you hear the Buddhist teaching formulated as “the cause of suffering is desire” and “stop desiring in order to stop suffering,” but I think the layperson is likely to misinterpret this as “so I can’t have any intentions or preferences,” due to the common usage of the word “desire” as “intending” or “preferring.” For example, see this LW comment thread which discusses the use of the word “desire” in this context, or Daniel Ingram’s discussion (and eschewal) of “no-preference models” of awakening.
Similarly, one could mean by “aversion” something like “dispreference” and describe someone who simply intends to alleviate pain as being averse to that pain, but this is not “aversion” as used in the Buddhist context to refer to the cause of suffering, tanha. While “aversion” may still be misinterpreted in such a manner, I think it’s less likely to be misunderstood than terms like “desire.” Same for “craving”—I think people are generally already familiar with “craving” in experience in the sense of “I must have that which I crave, I am not ok without having that which I crave.”
On one hand, yeah, Buddhism has a lot of new concepts, and if you don’t translate them, it sounds like incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, and if you do translate them, the translated words do not have the same connotations as the original ones. So there is now way to make the listener such as me happy.
On the other hand, it kinda sounds like if I told you “hey, I have a chocolate cookie for you”, and then added that I actually use very idiosyncratic definitions of “chocolate”, “cookie”, and “you”, so you shouldn’t really expect to get anything resembling a chocolate cookie at all, maybe not even anything edible, and maybe actually you won’t get nothing. But if I disclose it this way, it’s not really motivating.
If we tried to avoid sneaking in connotations, it might be something like: “Buddhism uses words for many concepts you don’t know, let’s just call them ‘untranslatable’ for now. So, we have figured out that untranslatable-1 causes untranslatable-2, but if you do a lot of untranslateble-3, then instead of untraslatable-2 you get untranslatable-4, and we would like to teach you how to do that.” And if someone asked “okay, this sounds confusing, but just to make sure, untranslatable-2 is bad and untranslatable-4 is good, right?”, the answer would be “well, not in the sense that you use ‘good’ and ‘bad’; perhaps let’s say that untranslatable-2 is untranslatable-5, and untranslatable-4 is not that”.
Then the question is whether the idiosyncratic words are only ever explained using other idiosyncratic words, or whether at some point it actually connects with the shared reality. And if it’s the latter, how do all those words ultimately translate to… normal English.
Then the question is whether the idiosyncratic words are only ever explained using other idiosyncratic words, or whether at some point it actually connects with the shared reality.
The point is that the words ground out in actual sensations and experiences, not just other words and concepts. What I’m arguing is that it’s not useful to use the English word “suffering” to refer to ordinary pain or displeasure, because there is a distinction in experience between what we refer to as “pain” or “displeasure” and what is referred to by the term “dukkha,” and that “suffering” is best understood as this dukkha. That we commonly say things like “he suffered the pain” is an indication of this distinction already existing in English, even if there is a tendency to messily equivocate between the two.
I want to address a common misconception that I see you having here when you write phrases like:
Importantly, “not being averse to pain,” in the intended sense of the word aversion, does not mean that one is “indifferent to pain,” in the sense of (not) having intentions and preferences. When I speak of “craving” or “aversion,” I am referring to a very specific kind of mental action and experience which results in suffering, not to intentions and preferences. Craving/aversion is the kind of desire which finds the way things presently are fundamentally unacceptable. Craving is like an attempt to grab at sensations and experiences, and aversion is like an attempt to hold them at arm’s length.
So, it isn’t the case that someone who has let go of craving/aversion and therefore suffering is completely indifferent to pain or that they won’t take action to alleviate the pain. If you stab a non-sufferer, they’ll still e.g. go to a hospital and have the wound treated. They’ll still have a general preference for pleasure over pain and take actions in accordance with those preferences; they just won’t seek pleasure or avoid pain in the sense of “I am not ok without this pleasure, or with this pain”—that’s craving and aversion. Pain still serves its important functional role, without the extra mental (re)actions of aversion and suffering.
This is also why I prefer to use terms like craving, aversion, and clinging to terms like “desire.” Sometimes you hear the Buddhist teaching formulated as “the cause of suffering is desire” and “stop desiring in order to stop suffering,” but I think the layperson is likely to misinterpret this as “so I can’t have any intentions or preferences,” due to the common usage of the word “desire” as “intending” or “preferring.” For example, see this LW comment thread which discusses the use of the word “desire” in this context, or Daniel Ingram’s discussion (and eschewal) of “no-preference models” of awakening.
Similarly, one could mean by “aversion” something like “dispreference” and describe someone who simply intends to alleviate pain as being averse to that pain, but this is not “aversion” as used in the Buddhist context to refer to the cause of suffering, tanha. While “aversion” may still be misinterpreted in such a manner, I think it’s less likely to be misunderstood than terms like “desire.” Same for “craving”—I think people are generally already familiar with “craving” in experience in the sense of “I must have that which I crave, I am not ok without having that which I crave.”
On one hand, yeah, Buddhism has a lot of new concepts, and if you don’t translate them, it sounds like incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, and if you do translate them, the translated words do not have the same connotations as the original ones. So there is now way to make the listener such as me happy.
On the other hand, it kinda sounds like if I told you “hey, I have a chocolate cookie for you”, and then added that I actually use very idiosyncratic definitions of “chocolate”, “cookie”, and “you”, so you shouldn’t really expect to get anything resembling a chocolate cookie at all, maybe not even anything edible, and maybe actually you won’t get nothing. But if I disclose it this way, it’s not really motivating.
If we tried to avoid sneaking in connotations, it might be something like: “Buddhism uses words for many concepts you don’t know, let’s just call them ‘untranslatable’ for now. So, we have figured out that untranslatable-1 causes untranslatable-2, but if you do a lot of untranslateble-3, then instead of untraslatable-2 you get untranslatable-4, and we would like to teach you how to do that.” And if someone asked “okay, this sounds confusing, but just to make sure, untranslatable-2 is bad and untranslatable-4 is good, right?”, the answer would be “well, not in the sense that you use ‘good’ and ‘bad’; perhaps let’s say that untranslatable-2 is untranslatable-5, and untranslatable-4 is not that”.
Then the question is whether the idiosyncratic words are only ever explained using other idiosyncratic words, or whether at some point it actually connects with the shared reality. And if it’s the latter, how do all those words ultimately translate to… normal English.
The point is that the words ground out in actual sensations and experiences, not just other words and concepts. What I’m arguing is that it’s not useful to use the English word “suffering” to refer to ordinary pain or displeasure, because there is a distinction in experience between what we refer to as “pain” or “displeasure” and what is referred to by the term “dukkha,” and that “suffering” is best understood as this dukkha. That we commonly say things like “he suffered the pain” is an indication of this distinction already existing in English, even if there is a tendency to messily equivocate between the two.