Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
The Meaning of Dukkha
John
D. Hughes
Recorded Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
33 Brooking St
Upwey, Victoria
Australia 3158
A.C.N. 005 701 806
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488
Phone: (03) 9754
3334
Fax: (03) 9754 3334
email: wbu@bdcu.org.au
Disclaimer and Copyright
Summary of
a talk given by the Venerable Phra Khantipalo at the Buddhist Discussion
Centre (Upwey) Ltd. on 14 March, 1982
The Buddha never heard of the word "yana". You must consider
that. You know Mahayana, Hinayana, Vajrayana, or Bodhisattvayana, or
Buddhayana, or how many others can you find?
No, there weren't any
such things in the Buddha's day. And he is unlikely to have instituted
such things, because the Buddha is a Teacher of universal dhamma, and does
not teach sectarianism. Part of the trouble with the unenlightened mind is
that it has to label everything.
Of course, we have words,
and those words are recognised names for things. But then we get confused
by using the words, and think the words are the things. We work the words
up into a pattern, major concepts, and then we believe in the concepts
which the confused mind thinks up. So actually, we believe our own
confused minds. So what could be more confused than that? Just because the
ideas happen to be there, we beDhammathey are true.
Now I can think of an
idea immediately. A mountain of gold, five miles high, in the middle of
Australia. As an idea its quite a logical idea. Such things as mountains
do exist, gold also exists, the middle of Australia exists, and if you put
them all together, it is possible. But should a mining company come and
say, "Look, we heard you discovered this mountain of solid gold. We are
interested. We will go halves with you", or something like that. That
would be rather generous of them, though. You cannot point it out, you can
only say "yes, well it is sort of in here, (pointing to the heart) a
mountain of gold five miles high in the middle of Australia, it is in
here".
Now that is an idea, that is a concept. If you fantasize
about it enough, it will become true for you, and then you will live in a
private world where you are seeking a mountain of gold five miles high in
the middle of Australia. Although the words are there, which are true, the
concept which is built out of them is not true. And it is the same when
people come to conceptualise about dhamma, then they use the words, the
words are true, but the ideas that they derive from it are not true. And
that again and again and again happens, so we are caught in a kind of
cleft stick, because all we have got for communication is words, apart
from the odd people who can communicate direct mind to mind. Let's not
consider them because they are rather unusual and rare. So then, most
people, all they have got is words.
An important part of
the dhamma is knowing how to use the words correctly so that the words do
not give rise to concepts which are false, and then knowing how to put
those ideas, those concepts, which are in terms of words, into practice. Now,
if you are successful then, what will happen is that you get beyond the
words. It doesn't happen on the level of sila, but it does happen on the
level of samadhi. A personDhammabeyond the level of words, beyond the range of
words, then you get some experience which is different from the people
whose world is a world of words. But even then, you have to still be
careful, because although the words are not present in that experience,
and you can say there is a wordless experience, yet even so, it can be
misinterpreted when the mind returns to the world
afterwards.
Suppose you are a mystic of some tradition or
other, perhaps not a Buddhist one, and you have a teaching, a doctrine, and
that doctrine is all written in wDhamman books, and it is the sort of doctrine
that one does not question because it comes from on high somewhere. If it
is like that, when you get back to the world of words, after your
experience, you do not try to investigate that experience to find out what
it is like. Instead you try to fit that experience into words. Where does
that experience I have had fit in? And this means that this experience is
distorted in terms of the words, because it is not just an experience
which is then examined, perhaps with insight, to find out about it, to
find out about its impermanence, or its dukkha, or even its not-self
nature, not examined in such a way. It has to be made to fit, even if it
does not fit.
It has to be pushed in somewhere, so generally with
that kind of teaching, one has to use that "Bed of Procrustes" method. You
know that Procrustean method? Old Procrustes, he is supposed to have lived
in ancient Greece, and he was a robber, and he had this bed. He used to
capture people who came over the pass where he lived, and he used to fit
them to his bed. If they were too short for the bed, then he stretched
them to fit, and if they were too long, he chopped them off to fit. If
they were the right length he let them go. That was his method. Also if
one does this with one's experiences, when one refers them back to words,
and says, look it is like this, it is like this, it is like this, using
the Procrustean method to make them fit, this is in opposition to dhamma,
this way of looking at things.
The way of dhamma is not to try to
make the experience fit the words. The words may be found to describe the
experience, and they may or they may not, because other people in
meditation have all sorts of experiences, all sorts of things happen to
them. But every kind of experience can be subjected to the investigation -
what is its true nature? Is it a conditioned or an unconditioned dhamma?
There is no third category. If it is a conditioned dhamma, okay, then it
is an experience of samsara, even though a very subtle one perhaps. If it
is an unconditioned dhamma, well then that is the real thing, that is
Nibbana.
So how does one tell the unconditioned from the
conditioned? If you think about it, you must know that the guidelines
given by the Buddha are very clear and precise. Now these experiences that
arise, they have to be tested against, they have to be tried against,
whether they are impermanent, whether is a subtle way they are dukkha, or
whether they have the characteristic of not-self. The Buddha selected
these three, these three aspects of reality as the touchstone to find out
about the experiences. He selected these three, not that he had the word
impermanence or not-self in his mind at any time when they were being
experienced, but he has the genius of translating to language the wordless
experiences of enlightenment. He knew too that it is possible to
misinterpret experiences that one has in meditation and believe that they
are enlightenment experiences.
Disaster foDhammale on
any spiritual path arises, because they suppose that they no longer
have anything left to do. Having reached the summit, there is not
anythDhammaft, nowhere to go. So you do not try, and since you do not try and you
believe that you do not have any defilements, the defilements increase,
increase a hundredfold in no time at all. This is what comes from
misinterpretation of the experience. You have to test it out, you find out
about it when one gets out of the calm enough to investigate. Oh, well,
what is it like? Is it like impermanence, an impermanence experience, or a
dukkha experience, or a not-self experience? If it is something else apart
from that , like it is remembering your former lives, or seeing what Mrs.
Smith is doing across the road, or knowing the kinds of kamma that other
people have made, or something like this, these kind of things, it has
nothing to do with enlightenment.
The way of craving is to
grasp at these experiences and make a lot of these things. ToDhammamountains out of
molehills in fact. If you have a nice little experience in mediation of
some kind, if you repeat it to your friends, and tell other people about
it, which shouldn't be done, of course, then the size of the experience
increases the more that you talk about it. What starts off as a quite
modest bright light shining in front of you may be a light like ten
thousand suns or something like that by the time you have described it a
few times. That is something to be rather careful
about.
Misinterpretation of dhamma in terms of words is a difficult
thing not to do. One has to be careful to avoid it. One won't make anymore
effort. But also, on a lower level, one has to be careful about words too.
Words are tricky things. Although we are used to using words, we are used
to using English words yet they are tricky things, and when the dhamma is
described in English, it is very easy to give the wrong
impression.
The word "suffering" was used as the translation of
"dukkha". If one understands like that, (the word "suffering" can
encompass all that Buddha means by "dukkha") you can get a very slanted
and distorted picture of what he is talking about, because suffering is a
fairly unsubtle kind of word. If you have got suffering with regard to the
body it must mean something fairly serious. Just because you have been
sitting there for half an hour, you are not going to say "I have got
suffering in the body". People do not use it like that, only Buddhists
perhaps.
Also mental suffering means something fairly heavy. It is
not going to mean slight troubles and small things, or fine kind of
troubles. So they have understood in the ordinary way of the English
language. But when it is understood like that, then the Buddha's teachings
are quite distorted, because they do not see the more subtle aspects of
dukkha, and when one doesn't understand the more subtle aspects of dukkha,
one can miss the whole point, because obviously suffering, the English
varieties, are quite limited.
Now, dukkha is characteristic of
everything that is conditioned. When people see suffering described as a
characteristic of all that is conditioned, they cannot understand
it.
Unless a person has that kind of experience in meditation, and
knows the unsatisfactory nature of even a calm and blissful experience,
they won't know what the Buddha is talking about, about the dukkha. When
it is regarded as calm and blissful, that gives a chance to the craving
and greed to get into it and stick there. It becomes one of those places
where one can exist there. Different levels for consciousness to exist on,
and to stick on. But then if it is investigated, you see it is not
satisfactory, and that is the way of release from it, that is the way of
freedom from it, and then one can refine it a bit more and find out a bit
more.
Our use of words is quite importDhammae
communicate the dhamma to others with words whether written or spoken, and we have
got all those ideas nicely sorted out in our heads, if we have
studied and practiced a bit, but, you have to consider how those ideas will
be viewed by other people who do not have that background at all.
The communication becomes quite a difficult business. Anyway, it is a much
more chancy business of communication in that case becausDhammaeems quite obvious to
us individually what words mean, but they have slightly different shades
of meaning for different people, and when we come to consider different
teachings and the way they use words; "dhamma" in India, see, all sorts of
people use the word "dhamma". It does not have the same meaning at all.
When Buddhists use "dhamma" and Hindus use "dhamma" they can be
talking about quite different things. What is dhamma in the sense of duty,
caste duty, for a Hindu, certainly is not anything to do with Buddha
Dhamma. It can in fact be opposite to loving-kindness and compassion.
Jains also use the word "dhamma", Sikhs use the word "dhamma". They all
use the word "dhamma" with their own particular flavours to it. A single
word can have many different shades of meaning, many different
computations.
References
Buddhist Discussion
Centre (Upwey) Ltd., First published in Newsletter No. 7, March,
1982.
Edited by Evelin C. Halls
"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".