Forum: Understanding Dukkha
THE POWER AND unpredictability of sudden suffering has been dramatically illustrated around the world recently—three terrible hurricanes on the East Coast, refugees pouring out of Burma and Syria, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. It would be a mistake, however, to equate dukkha, a centerpiece of Buddhist teaching, only with such devastating drama. Its scope extends far beyond this to include a much more subtle state of vulnerability that persists even in the absence of manifest pain, even in the midst of apparent contentment.
Buddha’s four ennobling truths present dukkha as the key to the knot in our existence, a knot that unravels only if we look into it closely. Mahayana traditions in Tibet speak of the sixteen aspects of the four noble truths. The four aspects of the first truth, dukkha, evoke the entire horizon of the path: pain, impermanence, emptiness, and selflessness. And indeed, looking closely into the pervasiveness of instability in our lives, we begin to see through the illusion of stable happiness and permanence of any kind; we realize that our personhood is not substantial, that our real selves are not invulnerable to causes and conditions.
When we recognize it, when dukkha and its corollaries are as apparent to us as a hair on our eyeball, we begin to wake up. We cease to be at odds with, or divided from, our real nature. Not knowing that nature, we feel separate from it. For the eleventh-century Tibetan sage Gampopa, this separation was the hallmark of the “ordinary person,” or so sor skyes bu—a term that in fact means someone who is “individuated” or experientially separate from understanding their nature.
Important as it is, dukkha is also not the whole story. In virtually all Buddhist traditions, the narrative of suffering has been balanced to a greater or lesser degree by the narrative of our intrinsic purity, our definite capacity to escape suffering. The limits of dukkha, then, are also crucial to the path. In the Pali canon’s Anguttara nikaya, Buddha explains that while the afflictions that cause suffering may come and go, the mind is always luminous. Mahayana emphasizes that our minds are empty in that we are never utterly stuck in any affliction or untoward habit pattern, no matter how pernicious. Asanga, the Indian master famous for meeting Maitreya in visions and receiving many teachings from him, emphasized that our essence is like stainless space, the dharmadhatu, the real nature of buddhas and non-buddhas alike. Longchenpa, the great Nyingma architect of Dzogchen in Tibet, cited Asanga to emphasize the crucial importance of recognizing this relentlessly promising and unassailable aspect of our nature.
This is our other face, what Zen calls your face before your mother was born. If we don’t recognize this face, Asanga says, we won’t appreciate the unsatisfactoriness of ordinary experience— nor will we seek freedom from it. Catching a glimpse of this face early on gives us the strength to look deeply into the well of our own vulnerability. Knowers of reality, said Vasubandhu, have the final, full, undefended recognition of dukkha.
ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN (Rigzin Drolma) is a professor of religion at Rice University and cofounder of Dawn Mountain Center for Tibetan Buddhism in Houston
KONIN CARDENAS is the guiding teacher of Ekan Zen Study Center
MARK UNNO is a Shin Buddhist priest and professor of East Asian religions at the University of Oregon
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