The Buddhist Fuzz Word dukkha

The Fuzz word dukkha

A fuzz word is an umbrella term that covers a variety of meanings. It cannot produce meaning closure, therefore leaves the reader to superimpose his or her own meaning. In short, a fuzz word is one with a high degree of ambiguity. All the important words used by the Buddha were fuzz words, e.g. anatta, nirvana, sankhara, dharma and so on.

The word dukkha is derived from Sanskrit.

duHkha: According to Sanskrit grammarians properly written ‘duS-kha’ and said to be from dus and kha, but more probably a Pra1kritized form for duH-stha, means: stressful, i.e. a modern umbrella term for uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult, hard; uneasiness, pain, sorrow, difficulty; with difficulty. duHkham = to be sad or uneasy.

Pali ‘experts’ (i.e. 19^th century Christian amateur translators) generally accepted that there is no English equivalent for the word. In fact, no one knows its precise meaning. It is generally translated into English as:

dukkha: unpleasant, painful (probably inapplicable because too strong physically), causing misery (so Buddhaghosa); fig. pain, entailing sorrow (probably inapplicable because too strong mentally or emotionally) or trouble; possibly ‘ill’. The most flexible modern translations of the term would be either stress or distress.

Note: the original meanings presented above do not include the term ‘suffering’ (i.e. intense anguish). Suffering (and its notion) is inserted later (and deviously) to increase the intensity, and therefore impact, of the word dukkha. Hence the translation ‘The Four Noble Truths of Suffering’ is false. It should read: ‘The Four Noble Truths of Unpleasantness’ (or simply distress).

The Tathagata could have saved everybody a lot of dukkha (and prevented the writing of a mountain of irrelevant and misleading articles and books) had he provided and unambiguous definition of the term. But he didn’t. He merely provided a biased selection of examples of the emergence of dukkha.

“This, O bhikkhus, is the Noble Truth of dukkha (here dukkha is usually intentionally mistranslated as suffering): birth is dukkha; decay is dukkha; illness is dukkha; death is dukkha. Presence of objects we hate is dukkha; separation from objects we love is dukkha; not to obtain what we desire is dukkha. Briefly, the fivefold clinging to existence is dukkha.”

Note the extraordinary ambiguity of the foregoing! The word dukkha here means ‘stressful’ (hence dukkha meaning No 1), to wit, ‘birth is stressful’. However, distress (or suffering) (hence dukkha meaning No 2), and which can be managed, controlled and eliminated, happens as a response to the stressfulness (i.e. stress or stressors). In the latter sense, the 1^st Noble truth is logically the 2^nd Noble Truth, namely the cause of distress.

In short, dukkha can mean either stress (dukkha No 1) or the response to stress, namely distress (= suffering, unpleasantness and so on), i.e. dukkha No 2.

The fundamentally dual character of the word dukkha (as well as of the other fuzz words used by the Buddha, see above) eventually led to the ‘Two Truths’ teaching of Buddhism and which contributed significantly to the disappearance of Buddhism’s in India.