SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM.pdf

SUFFERING IN MIND: THE AETIOLOGY

OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM

John Peacock

The question of suffering haunts us both collectively and individually driving us in

our thinking to grasp for control and to search for something essential and

unchanging to which we can attach ourselves. It is an analysis of these issues, and a

practical way of overcoming the suffering that is disclosed, to which the teachings

of early Buddhism are directed.

However, from the moment of ﬁrst contact, the West’s perception of

Buddhism has been severely ﬂawed by a misapprehension of the role that

suffering plays within this ancient tradition. What Buddhism teaches is that human

anguish is a product of desire (tanh ¯). This desire can be traced to its origin and

eradicated, and there is a distinct method for the accomplishment of this.

The Buddha emphasises again and again in the P ¯ li Suttas that he only teaches

suffering and its overcoming. It is this goal, the ending of pain, that is seen as the

summum bonum of Buddhist religious practice. The problem and its overcoming is

considered to be of a distinctly psychological nature, and by no stretch of the

imagination could this conviction be labelled, as many commentators have, an

apathetic submission to suffering. The failure to understand this has led to the

identiﬁcation of Buddhist doctrine and practice being viewed as species of

nihilism—a religious tradition fostering a pessimistic and even hostile attitude

towards life. As a consequence, the goal of Buddhist striving, the realisation

of anatt ¯ -nibb ¯ na, is understood as an extinction of essential being in the

ontological sense.

However, before embarking upon an examination of the role of suffering in

the early Buddhist tradition I would like to draw attention to the inadequate

nature of the term ‘suffering’ as a translation of the P ¯ li/Sanskrit term

dukkha/duhkha. 1 This word, together with many other words in P ¯ li and Sanskrit,

are ill-served by their English translations. The English rendering of both

dukkha/duhkha and many other primary Buddhist terms, fails to capture the many

resonances found within the original languages. The principal meaning of the

term ‘dukkha/duhkha’ is ‘misery’ or ‘unpleasantness’. Yet etymologically the

word is even more interesting as it is a compound formed out of two terms, dus

and kha. Dus indicates something unpleasant or dirty, difﬁcult or hard, whilst kha

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 9, No. 2, November 2008

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/08/020209-226

q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940802574068

210 JOHN PEACOCK

is a synonym of the Sanskrit term ak ¯ ´ a denoting ‘space’, ‘atmosphere’, or ‘sky’.

Literally the term dukkha/duhkha could be translated as a ‘bad space’, or ‘difﬁcult

situation’. The term was often used to refer to the hole in a wheel into which the

axle of a cart or chariot was ﬁtted. 2 This space or hole was packed with grease and

grit and went round and round. This metaphorically referred to the failure of the

‘wheel of life’ (dharma cakra) to run smoothly when under the inﬂuence of

‘ignorance’ (avijj ¯ /avidy ¯ ). The Buddha did not invent the term dukkha/duhkha but

drew it from pre-Buddhist thought. In the Manu-Smrti, 3 for example, one of the

many meanings that is given is ‘the hole made by an arrow’—indicating yet again

something ‘sharp’, ‘painful’, and ‘unpleasant’. If we require a one-word translation

of the term dukkha/duhkha then ‘unsatisfactoriness’ comes the closest.

The investigation of dukkha/duhkha, it should be noted, is the starting point of

all Indian soteriology, not just of the Buddhist tradition.

Throughout a large number of Indian traditions, including Buddhism, a

medical analogy is employed that states human existence is afﬂicted by an

illness—that illness is termed dukkha/duhkha. Like those before him, the Buddha

chooses to begin his investigation here. Moreover, within most Buddhist traditions

the Buddha is likened to a ‘spiritual doctor’ who diagnoses the illness of

dukkha/duhkha and, this is the important aspect, prescribes a regimen that allows

one to return to health.

Christian missionaries, theologians and Indologists in the nineteenth

century, however, by and large disseminated the view that Buddhism inculcated a

submission to suffering and a longing for extinction expressed in the nihilism of

Nibb ¯na/Nirv ¯ na. The great Sanskrit scholar Monier Williams 4 in 1889 condemned

the perceived nihilism of Buddhism and asked the following rhetorical question:

Which book shall we clasp to our hearts in our last hour—the book that tells us

of the dead, the extinct, the death-giving Buddha, or the book that reveals to us

the living, the eternal, the life-giving Christ? (Williams 1889)

For others Buddhism was the ‘most unmitigated system of pessimism the world

has perhaps ever seen’ (Kellogg 1885). What provoked such ire was Buddhism’s

atheistic stance together with its alleged nihilism. This view, however, can be

viewed as a projection onto the ‘Other’ of a deﬁning feature of Western civilisation

itself: the belief that the endurance of suffering is meaningful and redemptive. It is

to the credit of Friedrich Nietzsche, rather than any nineteenth-century Indologist,

that he was able to understand that the attitude to human suffering constituted

the most signiﬁcant difference between Buddhism and the Christianity he was

familiar with.

Without blaming themselves or others, the Buddha urged human beings to

summon up their energies and work out their freedom and happiness—before

death. His last words, reported in the Mah ¯ parinibb ¯ na Sutta were:

Everything compounded is evanescent - strive on untiringly. 5

AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 211

A group of Jains told the Buddha that they practised self-mortiﬁcation because

they believed that suffering produces happiness. The Buddha told them that this

view contradicted itself. How can one achieve happiness through suffering? He

had, he told them, found a way of winning happiness through happiness. 6

Buddhism takes on, therefore, a distinctly ‘this-worldly’ character in its quest

for freedom and happiness and this is expressed in clear and unambiguous terms

in the Rohit ¯ ssa Sutta. 7 The genre of this discourse, classiﬁed among discourses

with devas, is a brilliant didactic device. The Buddha’s interlocutor is a deva, a ‘god’

called Rohit ¯ ssa. A disincarnate celestial being comes down to earth and seeks

instruction from a corporeal being. With superb irony, the concept of deva is made

to deconstruct itself. Rohit ¯ ssa has ﬂown through the air to reach the end of the

world but—no such end could be found. Thereafter, without stopping to eat or

drink, he has sped backwards and forwards across aeons, but could not reach the

end of time. Rohit ¯ ssa’s ‘restless spirit’ was still seeking an answer to this

conundrum. So he approached the Buddha and asked:

Is it possible, venerable sir, by travelling to know or to see or to reach the end of

the world, where one is not born, does not age, does not die, does not pass

away, and is not reborn?

The question was formulated in terms of an average person’s longing for another

world, which is not circumscribed by space and time. The answer given was in

itself a brilliant diagnosis of the human psyche, which longs for something better

after death, something eternal, permanent and unchanging. The Buddha

responds to Rohitassa in the following way:

As to that end of the world, friend, where one is not born, does not age, does not

pass away, and is not reborn—I say that it cannot be known, seen, or reached by

travelling ... However, friend, I say that without having reached the end of the

world there is no making an end to suffering. It is, friend, in just this fathom-long

carcass endowed with perception and mind that I make known the world, the

origin of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world. 7

Thus, the end of suffering or ‘unsatisfactoriness’ is not to be found in some other

place but in this world. The Buddha’s reply is a movement away from the religious

responses of his time to the problem of suffering and to those found outside the

India of his day. It could be speculated that the question is placed in the mouth of

a supernatural being to point out the emptiness of the supernatural. The Buddha

appears to dismantle the binary opposition ‘nature/super-nature’ before giving his

answer: the rise and cessation of perceptions and ideas are indissolubly linked

with the birth, growth and dissolution of ‘this fathom long carcass’ (i.e., the

physical form of the individual). The ‘metaphysical’ the Buddha claims, both here

and many other places within the P ¯ li canon, is a delusion produced by craving;

the metaphysical is thus seen as part of the problem, not its solution.

The ﬁgure Siddhattha Gotama, known by the epithet ‘Buddha’, ‘awoke’ 8 by

his own effort. It is the Buddha’s awakening—word Buddha is derived from

212 JOHN PEACOCK

a Pali/Sanskrit root meaning ‘to wake up’—without intercession that has been a

primary motivational force for Buddhist practitioners for two and a half millennia.

For, if the ﬁgure Siddhattha Gotama can achieve awakening, the way was open to

others to achieve the same end by their own dedicated efforts. Moreover, the

Buddha himself encouraged his followers to:

live as islands ... being your own refuge, with no one else as your refuge, with

the Dhamma as an island, with the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other

refuge. 9

The Dhamma/Dharma was to be the refuge because this was the ‘way things

were’ and this is what a Buddha had ‘woken up’ to. It was the injunction to

‘wake up’ that the Buddha ceaselessly repeated to his followers over his 45-year

dispensation. The content of this awakening was to ‘awake’ to the true nature

about the way things were rather than dwelling in some ﬁctional fantasy about

the way you would like them to be. It was the ‘desire’ for things to be otherwise

than they actually were that the Buddha pinpointed as the origin of human

malaise in the world.

To encourage his followers to ‘awaken’ themselves’ the Buddha delineated a

methodology so that they could discern for themselves what he had discovered

through experimentation and great struggle. He called this the Middle Way of the

‘Four Ennobling Truths’. 10 These truths are ‘ennobling’ because one is ‘ennobled’ by

enquiring into suffering or unsatisfactoriness. It not that suffering, or unsatisfactori-

ness is in itself ‘Noble’. An individual, so the Buddha says, does not gain nobility by

merely suffering. To repeat, it is the enquiry into the possibility of overcoming

suffering or unsatisfactoriness that is ennobling.

The P ¯ li Canon contains hundreds of discourse delivered by the Buddha

over the course of his long teaching career; however, in many ways all these

teachings can be seen as clariﬁcations of these Four Ennobling Truths in their

theoretical aspects, or practical guidelines for living according to them.

The Buddha begins his analysis in the following way:

Now this, bhikkhus, 11 is the ennobling truth of the origin of suffering: birth

suffering, ageing is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, union with

what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not

to get one wants is suffering; in brief, the ﬁve aggregates subject to clinging are

suffering. (Bhikkhu Bodhi 2000 1844)

When the Buddha is speaking about suffering in this passage he is referring to the

totality of everything that is unsatisfactory mat occurs in an individual’s life—I shall

return to the brief mention of the ﬁve aggregates later in this paper. He goes on to

outline that this suffering/unsatisfactoriness has a cause, that it can cease, and that

there is a path to its cessation. 12

If we return brieﬂy to the analogy of the Buddha as a spiritual physician then

the Four Ennobling Truths can be seen as beginning with a diagnosis; there is a

disease and this disease has a cause, which culminates in the good news of a return

AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 213

to health—the disease can end and there is a ‘way’ to return to health. The

Buddha, from the point of view of the early tradition, was the physician who

healed himself. Dukkha/Duhkha is the Buddha’s word for the human predicament

and, as was pointed out above, he drew this term from the religio-philosophical

usage of the time, but imbued it with a distinct meaning. 13

Nearly all religions offer the possibility of salvation from the dissatisfaction

of temporal and corporeal existence by holding out the promise of a higher

metaphysical plane above that of ordinary existence. However, this often results in

a form of religious distress where humans experience the world as an alien reality

and a travail of tears. In this condition there is a longing for a state where death

shall be no more and where tears and frustration will be absent. The Buddha

sought to diagnose the cause of religious distress itself. His physician’s scalpel

probed beneath the layers until it touched the ‘self ’—the root cause of existential

anguish, which he termed sa nkh¯ ra dukkha—constructed, or compounded,

suffering. The Buddha attempted to unravel the tragic sense of life that is present

in existential distress, the feeling that one has been ‘thrown’ into an alien world.

Moreover, the Buddha sought a cure for this sense of alienation that is productive

of the emotions of fear and longing. To be human was to be corporeal. Corporeal

conditionality necessarily implies birth, growth, decay and death. The Buddha

discerned upon examination that the religions and philosophies of his time 14

provided naive explanations and pseudo solutions for a false predicament into

which humans had manoeuvred themselves. He therefore made a distinction

between different form of dukkha/duhkha, delineating three distinct types—

dukkha-dukkha (physical pain), viparin¯ ma dukkha (suffering due to the

vicissitudes of life), and sa nkh¯ ra dukkha (‘Self’—constructed distress).

Dukkha-dukkha refers to physical pain: injury, sickness, discomfort, ageing

and death and so forth. In short, the totality of pain and discomfort that can be

attributed to being corporeal or physical in origin. The Buddha was no stranger to

this type of pain and the canonical tradition does not hide this fact. After his

Awakening the Buddha did not return with a transﬁgured body. In his later days

particularly, the Buddha suffered from ill health:

And during the rains the Lord was attacked by a severe sickness, with sharp

pains as if he were about to die. But he endured all this mindfully, clearly aware,

and without complaining. 15

He lived to the age of 80 years and experienced all of the problems that come with

embodiment. Near the end of his life he even joked about it with good grace:

¯ nanda, I am now old, worn out, venerable, one who has traversed life’s path,

I have reached the term of life, which is eighty. Just as an old cart is made to go

by being held together with straps, so the Tathagata’s 16

body is kept going by

being strapped up. 17

Even the Buddha’s ﬁnal illness was brought on by food poisoning. His last human

experience was one of intense physical pain and ¯ nanda, his attendant, who

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