Pain and Suffering

Full disclosure: I'm a wuss about pain. I do not bear pain silently and stoically. My dentist can confirm that the mere anticipation of pain makes me squirm.

But as somebody said, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." Pain and suffering are not the same thing. Pain is a physical sensation; suffering is how we choose to experience it. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote,

The Buddha compares being afflicted with bodily pain to being struck by an arrow. Adding mental pain (aversion, displeasure, depression, or self-pity) to physical pain is like being hit by a second arrow. The wise person stops with the first arrow.

In the dentist's chair I don't even wait for the first arrow. I jab myself with second one -- aversion, displeasure, depression and self-pity -- as soon as I hear "open wide." Obviously, this points to an area of my practice that needs more work. This example also shows us that pain and suffering really aren't the same thing, because we can have suffering without pain. Can we also have pain without suffering?

The word suffering has a special significance in Buddhism. In his teachings of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha said that life is suffering. Of course, the Buddha didn't speak English; what he really said was that life is dukkha. Dukkha is not just about painful things. Anything that is temporary, limited or imperfect is dukkha. The most pleasant experience you ever enjoyed was dukkha, because it ended.

Although we associate the word suffer with unpleasantness, the word means many things -- to abide, to accept, to bear, to endure, to support, to sustain, to tolerate, to experience, to feel, to know. In other words, suffering is about relating to something else. In order to have relationship, there must be at least two things -- a sufferer and an object of suffering.

And here we touch on the heart of the matter -- Who is it that suffers? What is the self? And, What is separate from the self? Suffering depends on self-reference, with perceiving oneself as a finite entity plagued by some outside Other. Perhaps suffering isn't a bad translation for dukkha after all.

We read in the Tripitaka (Visuddhi Magga):

Mere suffering exists, no sufferer is found.
The deeds are, but no doer of the deeds is there,
Nirvana is, but not the man that enters it.
The path is, but no traveler on it is seen.

I believe I've rambled on long enough for now, but I hope to continue this in the next post.

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