‘Dukkha: Literally souring, often translated as suffering or unsatisfactoriness.
Dukkha is experienced when we are unaware, unawakened.’
Everyday Buddhism
‘Dukkha: Literally souring, often translated as suffering or unsatisfactoriness.
Dukkha is experienced when we are unaware, unawakened.’
Everyday Buddhism
Half the problem of Dukkha is the barriers we put up against it.
The medicine which cures the disease is the knowledge and practice that gives birth to emptiness. When emptiness has appeared it will be the cure of the disease and alter recovery from the disease there will be nothing save emptiness, the state void of Dukkha and. void of the mental defilements that are the cause of Dukkha
Every one of us has the disease of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, and we absorb more germs every time we see a form, smell an odour, touch a tangible object, taste a flavour, or think in the manner of an ignorant person. In other words, there is the reception of the germ, those things surrounding us that are infected and cause the disease, every time there is sense contact…
The matter of “I” and “mine” is the single essential point of the Buddhist teachings. It is the one thing which must be completely purged. It follows that here lies the knowing, understanding, and practice of all the Buddhist Teachings without exception.
Unfortunately, one of the ills of modern society is that it’s in headlong flight from the truth of the human condition, from the fact that we all, without exception, are subject to old age, sickness and death…
There is a word in Buddhism that covers this completely, the word sunnata, or emptiness, emptiness of selfhood, emptiness of any essence that we might have a right to cling to with all our might as being ‘mine’…
If the Buddha had started with the teaching that there is no suffering, none of us would have believed it: There certainly is! He certainly got that wrong! So he started with: There is suffering…