Pain and Proliferation
Doug Smith
The Buddha”s gradual path to awakening begins with generosity and ethical behavior. These calm and gladden the mind, taking it away from states of possessiveness or regret. However when it comes to gaining the wisdom essential to right view, the Buddha tells us in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta that there is something which “is to be fully understood” if we are to reach nibbāna. This is dukkha, which is ordinarily translated “suffering”, even if it is more accurate to translate it as something more like “unsatisfactoriness”.
What is this state
Its standard description runs as follows:
[B]irth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha; union with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are dukkha. (Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11; adapted).
This does not define the state, instead it identifies it with a number of bad experiences and then (oddly) with the five aggregates themselves, which are form, feeling, perception, volitions, and consciousness. This is odd because the formula claims that the five aggregates basically sum up the other bad experiences listed (“in brief”), however this does not seem obviously so. After all, not all perceptions, feelings, or conscious states are bad. We have pleasant perceptions, pleasant feelings, pleasant conscious states.
The problem is that these aggregates are “subject to clinging”, or to use Richard Gombrich”s more metaphorical translation of upādānakkhanda, they are “blazing masses of fuel” for dukkha. (p. 114). They are its substratum, what keeps it going.
In the Chachakka Sutta (MN 148), the Buddha elaborates what “should be understood” as the “six sets of six”, that is the six sense organs, the six kinds of things sensed, the six kinds of conscious reactions to them, the six kinds of contact that exist between them, the six kinds of feeling that arise based upon them, and the six kinds of craving that arise based on feeling. Or to put it more prosaically, we are to understand how experiencing things in the world, and having thoughts about those things, leads to the arising of pleasant and unpleasant feelings that cause us to become attached to and identified with things.
The formula the Buddha uses is closely akin to a section of the classic formula of dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda), but with more detail on the act of perception itself. Understanding this process is crucial to the process of liberation, since it is at the juncture between feeling and craving that the chain can be broken. We cannot change the fact that certain experiences are pleasant and unpleasant, however we can change how we react to that pleasantness and unpleasantness.
This is important: we cannot eliminate unpleasant experiences. We may hope for a form of practice that will do so, but is a vain hope, in reality itself a kind of craving for the pleasant and rejection of the unpleasant. Sometimes it is said that forms of meditation can reduce or eliminate physical pain. If they do so, they will only do so temporarily.
The Buddha”s Physical Pain
In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 16), the account of the Buddha”s last days makes clear that he bore significant physical discomfort: “[W]hen the Blessed One had entered upon the rainy season, there arose in him a severe illness, and sharp and deadly pains came upon him. And the Blessed One endured them mindfully, clearly comprehending and unperturbed.”
As he said,
Now I am frail, Ananda, old, aged, far gone in years. This is my eightieth year, and my life is spent. Even as an old cart, Ananda, is held together with much difficulty, so the body of the Tathagata is kept go…
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