3 Page Paper “Dukkha”
Dukkha and the ending of dukkha is something that from the beginning of class has been a topic of great importance. As I have experienced the class, I have gone from not understanding what dukkha is, to knowing a relative definition in the Buddhist prospective and applying it to the experience of life. Still though, our intentions in life according to the Buddhist practice should not only be to establish an understanding of what dukkha is in definition terms, but to apply the lessons in which to end dukkha.
What is the definition of dukkha? According to the website Orientalia, dukkha is “suffering, misery, being a necessary attribute of sentient existence; the first of the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha is sorrow and suffering stemming from the blindness to non-permanence and the lack of true understanding of its reality.” I take heart into what the last part of this definition says about dukkha, that it is a “lack of true understanding of its reality.” According to this definition we must understand what reality is in order to realize the misunderstanding of reality, a concept that we also spent a lot of time in class indulging on, and as we now know, for good reason.
The nature of reality is different for every sentient being. This is because we all have subjective experiences of this reality from our sensorium. Whenever something occurs and we react to it, we are experiencing it through the smell, the touch, the eyes, and anything that brings input into our mind. In the prospective of neuroscience, science has said that this sensorium experience is true as our mind is the ultimate decider of what is reality, and makes up the experience of the consciousness through the interactions of outside world in a conglomerate operation of world and mind interaction. In this prospective we can say that it’s not the object in the world that causes the experience of the objects, but the interaction between object and mind. This interaction sounds very familiar to another topic that we talked about in class, the concept of interdependent co-arising which is very important idea to understand in order to cause an ending of dukkha in one’s life.
Interdependent co-arising (ICA) is the understanding that nothing exists without the relationship between all other things. The smallest bug, if not existing when it does, changes the form of reality and causes everything else to change in some way or form. It also means that our relationship of reality in our minds changes at every moment, due to the changes that are all around us and in our experience of our self.
Defining reality is a long about way of saying that it is different for every person and different at all times, a process, and experience of the moment. With this understanding now we can go back to explaining what dukkha is.
As reality is different for every person, and so is dukkha. At every moment in the experience of life, reality changes and so does dukkha. Dukkha is the resistance that is applied to life, the resistance to change that occurs in reality which happened regardless of if we want it to or not. This resistance causes us fear, hate, greed, and suffering. According to one of my papers I wrote for class, I defined dukkha to be “everything that we hope will last but indelibly will end. Dukkha is the lie that we tell ourselves in order to believe that the things that makes us happy will forever exists.” As I wrote this definition earlier in class, I would like to change my definition to be, dukkha is the un-satisfaction in life. How I came about to this definition was through the experience of a dream where I was able to come face to face with my fear. Looking back at this dream and into the meaning behind it, this fear I found was the experience of another cause, the cause being the unsatisfied feeling of life. The unsatisfied feeling of not living for ever, the fear of dying, the unsatisfied feeling of losing love, the fear of a breakup, the unsatisfied feeling of the moment of reality, the fear of all life. Reality changes all the time and in the famous words of Forrest Gump, “It happens.” Reality just happened and trying to control this reality, trying to control change, does nothing but cause reality to still happen. This resistance and un-satisfaction that we feel in result causes us to feel fear, this aspect of dukkha.
When I think about this unsuccessful resistance that we call dukkha, I think of the real life situation of drowning rafter:
A rafter falls into the water off of a boat into a dangerous river. The rushing river goes in one direction and the frantic rafter tries to fight the current in order to get back to where he once started because he believes he will be saved. The more the rafter tries to fight the river, the more he becomes tired, and because of impossibility to win this fight with the river, the rafter sinks to the bottom in exhaustion and dies.
A rafter falls into the water off of a boat into dangerous river. The rushing river goes in one direction and the calm rafter accepts the circumstance and relaxes placing his feel facing downstream to protect the rafter from danger. The rafter calmly moves to the side of the river and steps out of the water, alive, and accepting of the situation.
The Buddha’s teaching is the practice of understanding dukkha and the ending of dukkha. From what I have defined, the journey of enlightenment, or understanding of dukkha and the ending of dukkha is different for each one of us. The Buddha said that, “if you find the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” What I believe is meant by what the Buddha said is that each one of us have our own path to understanding dukkha and ending it, and that not ones persons path is the same as another’s. We must all be with our own fears, our own anger, our own happiness, and the moment.
In my blog I have had a reoccurring theme where I place “/end dukkha” at the end of some of my posts to empathize the meaning of action. I do this because it because the forward slash means to act, to not just wait and hope for the future, to end dukkha now, and to accept reality as is now in this very moment. I want to end this class with that prospective, that life is not about waiting, it’s not about really even acting, it’s just about being with what is. What is…is reality and we are all a part of it. With this understanding we can all be together with reality, understanding it and let it happen. With this prospective we can…
/end dukkha
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