Understanding Dukkha

Understanding Dukkha 

DUKKHA STICKS ON THE skin and goes into the flesh; from the flesh, it gets into the bones. It’s like an insect on a tree that eats through the bark, into the wood, and then into the core, until finally the tree dies. 

As we grow up, it gets buried deep inside. 

Our parents teach us grasping and attachment, giving meaning to things, believing firmly that we exist as a self-entity and that things belong to us. From our birth that’s what we are taught. 

We hear this over and over again, and it penetrates our hearts and stays there as our habitual feeling. We’re taught to get things, to accumulate and hold on to them, to see them as important and as ours. This is what our parents know, and this is what they teach us. So it gets into our minds, into our bones. When we take an interest in meditation and hear the teaching of a spiritual guide, it’s not easy to understand. It doesn’t really grab us. We’re taught not to see and do things the old way, but when we hear this, it doesn’t penetrate our hearts. So we sit and listen to teachings, but it’s often just sound entering the ears. It doesn’t get inside and affect us. 

It’s like we’re boxing, and we keep hitting the other guy but he doesn’t go down. We remain stuck in our self-view. The wise have said that moving a mountain from one place to another is easier than moving the conceit of self-view, this solid feeling that we really exist as some special individual. We can use explosives to level a mountain and then move the earth. But the tight grasping of self-conceit—oh man! 

Our wrong ideas and bad tendencies remain so solid and unbudging, and we’re not aware of them. So the wise have said that removing this view and turning wrong understanding into right understanding is about the hardest thing to do. 

For us who are worldly beings (putthujana) to progress on to being virtuous beings (kalyanajana) is not easy. A putthujana is one who is thickly obscured, who is dark, who is stuck deep in this darkness and obscuration. The kalyanajana has made things lighter. We teach people to lighten, but they don’t want to do that, because they don’t understand their situation, their condition of obscuration. So they keep on drifting in their confused state. 

 ~ Ajahn Chah 

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