My point is that in English “experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain” would be considered an uncontroversial example of “suffering”, not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there’s a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.
I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker “Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again” they would assume you were claiming that this would include “never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain.” If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they’d been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.
So basically the Buddhist word that gets translated to English as suffering means something like “second-order (and higher) effects of pain (and other emotions)”, while the natural meaning of the English word is more like “all effects of pain”.
The question is whether those are two different words in the original language, or it was a bait-and-switch from the very beginning.
I’ve seen dukkha translated as something more like “unsatisfactoriness” which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you’ve been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you’re dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won’t make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.
My point is that in English “experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain” would be considered an uncontroversial example of “suffering”, not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added.
Sure, but I think that’s just because of the usual conflation between pain and suffering which I’m trying to address with this post. If you ask anyone with the relevant experience “does Buddhism teaching me to never suffer again mean that I’ll never experience (severe) pain again?”, they’ll just answer no. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think of this as a “bait-and-switch” because the dhamma never taught the end of pain, only the end of suffering; it’s not the dhamma’s fault if novices think the end of suffering means an end to pain.
it’s not the dhamma’s fault if novices think the end of suffering means an end to pain.
I think this text sounds quite misleading, though maybe it’s a problem of translation: (emphasis mine)
Bhikkhus, this is the one and only way for the purification of beings, for overcoming sorrow and lamentation, for the complete destruction of pain and distress, for attainment of the Noble Path, and for the realization of Nibbāna.
I’d guess it’s a problem of translation; I’m pretty confident the original text in Pali would just say “dukkha” there.
The Wikipedia entry for dukkha says it’s commonly translated as “pain,” but I’m very sure the referent of dukkha in experience is not pain, even if it’s mistranslated as such, however commonly.
My point is that in English “experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain” would be considered an uncontroversial example of “suffering”, not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there’s a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.
I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker “Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again” they would assume you were claiming that this would include “never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain.” If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they’d been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.
So basically the Buddhist word that gets translated to English as suffering means something like “second-order (and higher) effects of pain (and other emotions)”, while the natural meaning of the English word is more like “all effects of pain”.
The question is whether those are two different words in the original language, or it was a bait-and-switch from the very beginning.
I’ve seen dukkha translated as something more like “unsatisfactoriness” which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you’ve been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you’re dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won’t make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.
Sure, but I think that’s just because of the usual conflation between pain and suffering which I’m trying to address with this post. If you ask anyone with the relevant experience “does Buddhism teaching me to never suffer again mean that I’ll never experience (severe) pain again?”, they’ll just answer no. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think of this as a “bait-and-switch” because the dhamma never taught the end of pain, only the end of suffering; it’s not the dhamma’s fault if novices think the end of suffering means an end to pain.
I think this text sounds quite misleading, though maybe it’s a problem of translation: (emphasis mine)
I’d guess it’s a problem of translation; I’m pretty confident the original text in Pali would just say “dukkha” there.
The Wikipedia entry for dukkha says it’s commonly translated as “pain,” but I’m very sure the referent of dukkha in experience is not pain, even if it’s mistranslated as such, however commonly.