Buddhist theory of “Dukkha”

Buddhist theory of “Dukkha”

Introduction

Buddha distilled all of the goods and ills of life into 4 Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth is “Duhka”. Duhka is usually translated as “suffering” but that would be too easy. Duhka is a word which represents all of the imbalances, unfulfillments, discomforts, dissatisfactions, insecurities, hopes, fears, loves, and excitements of life. I think I like the word discomfort better than suffering, so for the rest of this paper, that is the word that I will use. Life is discomfort. It's like the fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea. There is always something not quite right, we are never truly happy. There is always some little underlying element, a subtle un-namable ache in the background of everything we do and everything we see and everything we feel that is uncomfortable.

Analysis

Existence is also an illusion. It is the construct that consciousness creates around and about the process that goes on day in and day out in every living creature beginning at birth and ending at death. Buddha broke this “process” down into 5 aggregates (skandas): body, sensation, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness. Imbalance and discomfort (duhka) are attached to each. Body, Rupa, represents material existence. We are born, we die, and this is the mechanism of the functioning of our body. Sensations, Vedana, represent internal and external sense experience in the form of feelings and sense data. For example, the warmth of the sun. Perceptions, Sanja, represents the recognition of external and internal objects for example (Yokota, John. 2000): a lovely shade of blue, a beautifully framed piece of artwork. Thoughts, Samskaras, are mental states. Buddha called them “subjective differentiations”. This aggregate also includes the will, attention, wisdom, compassion and all of the other varied types of mental activity. Consciousness, Vijnana, this is the shell between true awareness and the world (Takeda, 1985).

There are three primary characteristics of existence. They are: Impermanence, No Ego-Self, and Discomfort. Impermanence, Anitya, concerns the nature of the process. Since everything is in process, then everything is in the process of becoming something else. Nothing is static. Everything is in a state of flux (Knierim, 2009).

Discomfort is irrevocably bound to each of the skandas. If I reexamine the skandas, with the added meaning of the characteristics of existence and the second Noble Truth, the true implication of the first Noble Truth is proved out. ...