..续本文上一页. He feels one feeling — a bodily one, not a mental one.
Dukkha then is the second dart, this “mental feeling”, which the instructed noble disciple has extinguished. It is the sorrow, grief, lamenting, and the distraught frame of mind that is dukkha, not the physical pain itself.
The Buddha”s Mental Pain
It is good to keep in mind, however, that not all pain is physical: on the Buddha”s picture there are mental as well as physical perceptions and feelings. On the passing of his two greatest disciples, the Buddha displayed what might be termed mental pain:
Bhikkhus, this assembly appears to me empty now that Sāriputta and Moggallāna have attained final Nibbāna. This assembly was not empty for me [earlier], and I had no concern for whatever quarter Sāriputta and Moggallāna were dwelling in. …
It is just as if the largest branches would break off a great tree standing possessed of heartwood: so too, bhikkhus, in the great Bhikkhu Saṅgha standing possessed of heartwood, Sāriputta and Moggallāna have attained final Nibbāna. (SN 47.14/V.164).
If physical and mental pain are consistent with the elimination of dukkha, then what is dukkha
It is the unnecessary “second dart”; the mental pain we add to physical and mental pain. It is sorrow, grief, lamenting. Now it seems that this passage from the Buddha displays sorrow, grief, and lamenting. However the passage occurs in the context of deep awareness that all things are “conditioned and subject to disintegration”, and the Buddha himself claims to be without “sorrow or lamentation”.
So again, if mental and physical pain are consistent with the elimination of dukkha, then what is dukkha
It is obsession or endless rumination. In a word, it is papañca: mental proliferation.
Mental proliferation is a subject we”ve dealt with on two occasions, in “Aiming at Nonproliferation” we saw the role of proliferation in online discussions. In “Bāhiya”s Training on Mental Obsession” we looked at the central role that proliferation plays in the Buddha”s teaching to Bāhiya of the bark-cloth. Indeed, in that sutta and its near-twin in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (35.95/IV.72-76) the Buddha makes clear that this process of eliminating papañca leads to “the end of” dukkha.
Conclusion
In the context of daily life, moment to moment existence, dukkha and papañca, or suffering and mental proliferation, are precisely the same. There is no distinction between them. When the Buddha says the aim of practice is to end dukkha, of course he does not promise to end such things as aging, illness, and death. In his own lifetime he aged, got ill, felt strong physical and mental pain, and eventually died. Seen in that context, what he aims to end is the obsessive thinking that surrounds getting what we do not want, or failing to get what we want. This rumination is brought about by our clinging to and identifying with things in the world, which gets us into the Second Noble Truth.
The complete ending of this obsession, of stress and worry over past, present, and future, is what constitutes nibbāna. For it is that which also constitutes the ending of greed and hatred, and which constitutes an understanding of the Noble Truths themselves.
Or at least that is the picture. There is, I think we can see, a little daylight between the ending of mental rumination and the ending of greed and hatred. It seems one can be (as it were) a carefree egoist or bully, not to mention a kind of psychopath. The Buddha constructed the gradual training to derail this option, by setting ethical conduct as a gateway to practice. However he also seems to have believed that unethical conduct would necessarily produce papañca in its wake, making deep meditative achievements impossible. I expect this is an overly optimistic assumption, and if so one will have to make a distinction between (as it were) a subjective experience of nibbāna as the extinguishing of papañca and an objective qualification of nibbāna as validated by right action.
I say that dukkha is papañca “in the context of moment to moment existence” because of course there is an additional way that nibbāna extinguishes dukkha“s “birth, aging, illness, death”. Namely, on the traditional picture nibbāna is fully completed only at parinibbāna. And that is said to guarantee no future birth, aging, illness, or death; so in that sense on the traditional picture nibbāna literally does end all aspects of dukkha by ending the cycle of rebirth. On a secular picture of course that is not something we concern ourselves with. If we are engaged in ending suffering or the unsatisfactoriness of life by ending pointless rumination, that is enough to contend with.
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Bhikkhu Bodhi, Various Nikāyas (Wisdom).
Richard Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (Equinox, 2009).
Bhikkhuni Vajira and Francis Story (trans.), ”Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha” (DN 16). Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.16.1-6.vaji.html .
Maurice Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom, 1995).
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