Dukkha

 

Often the Buddha is considered a pessimist. "All is suffering" he declares.

The original Pali word is dukkha which is variously translated. "Suffering", "anguish" etc. In some Pali texts the words actually used as a synonym can run into double figures - the whole subject is complex.

A pessimist? I do not think so. In fact I find the Dharma very optimistic, in as much as what it declares is that if we see and think correctly we shall be free of suffering. Not in some future world of reward or compensation, but here, now in this world. Our world is not betrayed for some imagined "other".

I was recently reading an Introduction to one of the Theravada texts, and the subject of Dukkha was spoken of. I cannot really explain any better:-

The pivotal notion around which the Four Noble Truths revolve is that of dukkha, translated here as “suffering.” The Pali word originally meant simply pain and suffering, a meaning it retains in the texts when it is used as a quality of feeling: in these cases it has been rendered as “pain” or “painful.” As the first noble truth, however, dukkha has a far wider significance, reflective of a comprehensive philosophical vision. While it draws its affective colouring from its connection with pain and suffering, and certainly includes these, it points beyond such restrictive meanings to the inherent unsatisfactoriness of everything conditioned. This unsatisfactoriness of the conditioned is due to its impermanence, its vulnerability to pain, and its inability to provide complete and lasting satisfaction.

Reading this I think of the lines of W H Auden from his poem "The Time Being":-

As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur.
For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Or as T S Eliot says:-

A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything