degree, a flat stomach, an art museum membership card, a foreign vacation, a
sex life, a baby—the list is long, and each item on it seems to have generated
an advertising campaign, a market strategy, an expert adviser. Materialism is
too narrow a word for the army of cultural imperatives that both preserve and
besiege the...self...
(1999:x)Buddhism teaches that our suffering arises from the illusion that the individual self
is enduring and needs to be protected. The schools of depth psychology warn of our
tendencies to repeat experiences of fear and gratification through our psychological
complexes and repetition compulsions. Defending ourselves against events and
feelings that we evaluate as negative makes us desire only those things we believe to
be in our favor—and to abhor what we believe is not. These conditions naturally lead
to overwhelming experiences of despair, anxiety, and envy, as well as compulsions
and addictions. All of these ordinary forms of human suffering are now further
complicated by a metaphysics of vague notions of biological determinism.
Biological determinism is clearly no help with the burden or boredom of a
demanding self. It cannot answer questions about subjective meaning, nor address
the compulsions that arise from personal insecurity, without reducing them to organic
processes.
If you explain suffering only in organic terms, then you exclude the possibility that
you can change your life through changing your mind. If you further believe that the
world’s goods are worth acquiring, you will eventually face the fact that individual
and collective resources are depleted. What I have sketched out is the outline of a
unique problem of our period of time: human suffering without interest in its origins
or knowledge about its causes.
DukkhaThe First Noble Truth taught by the Buddha is often translated into English as ‘Life
is suffering.’ I find myself in agreement with those translators who prefer the terms
‘discontent’ or ‘anguish’ to suffering as a definition of dukkha. The First Noble Truth
then becomes ‘Human life is filled with discontent’ or ‘Our lives are mired in anguish.’
The Sanskrit word dukkha refers to a vast range of phenomena from the inevitable
aspects of illness, decline, and death to the ordinary discontent of everyday life. And
yet the word itself conveys a specific metaphor that sheds light on what it means to
be a human being.
Dukkha refers literally to a state of being off-center or out of balance, like a wheel
riding off its axle or a bone riding out of its socket. This off-centeredness is most
often experienced as negativity and restlessness. Most of us tend to notice dukkha
more acutely at times of adversity such as loss, illness, or difficulties in intimacy or
parenting that confront us with our limited control over the circumstances of our
lives. But dukkha occurs countless times in an ordinary day.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN SUFFERING 69