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Suffering in mind: the Aetiology of suffering in early Buddhism

John Peacock

Online Publication Date: 01 November 2008

To cite this Article John Peacock(2008)'Suffering in mind: the Aetiology of suffering in early Buddhism',Contemporary
Buddhism,9:2,209 — 226
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 SUFFERING IN MIND: THE AETIOLOGY
OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM

John Peacock
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The question of suffering haunts us both collectively and individually driving us in

our thinking to grasp for control and to search for something essential and
unchanging to which we can attach ourselves. It is an analysis of these issues, and a
practical way of overcoming the suffering that is disclosed, to which the teachings
of early Buddhism are directed.
However, from the moment of first contact, the West’s perception of
Buddhism has been severely flawed by a misapprehension of the role that
suffering plays within this ancient tradition. What Buddhism teaches is that human
anguish is a product of desire (tanhā). This desire can be traced to its origin and
eradicated, and there is a distinct method for the accomplishment of this.
The Buddha emphasises again and again in the Pāli Suttas that he only teaches
suffering and its overcoming. It is this goal, the ending of pain, that is seen as the
summum bonum of Buddhist religious practice. The problem and its overcoming is
considered to be of a distinctly psychological nature, and by no stretch of the
imagination could this conviction be labelled, as many commentators have, an
apathetic submission to suffering. The failure to understand this has led to the
identification of Buddhist doctrine and practice being viewed as species of
nihilism—a religious tradition fostering a pessimistic and even hostile attitude
towards life. As a consequence, the goal of Buddhist striving, the realisation
of anattā-nibbāna, is understood as an extinction of essential being in the
ontological sense.
However, before embarking upon an examination of the role of suffering in
the early Buddhist tradition I would like to draw attention to the inadequate
nature of the term ‘suffering’ as a translation of the Pāli/Sanskrit term
dukkha/duhkha.1 This word, together with many other words in Pāli and Sanskrit,
are ill-served by their English translations. The English rendering of both
dukkha/duhkha and many other primary Buddhist terms, fails to capture the many
resonances found within the original languages. The principal meaning of the
term ‘dukkha/duhkha’ is ‘misery’ or ‘unpleasantness’. Yet etymologically the
word is even more interesting as it is a compound formed out of two terms, dus
and kha. Dus indicates something unpleasant or dirty, difficult or hard, whilst kha

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 9, No. 2, November 2008

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/08/020209-226
q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940802574068
 210 JOHN PEACOCK

is a synonym of the Sanskrit term akāśa denoting ‘space’, ‘atmosphere’, or ‘sky’.

Literally the term dukkha/duhkha could be translated as a ‘bad space’, or ‘difficult
situation’. The term was often used to refer to the hole in a wheel into which the
axle of a cart or chariot was fitted.2 This space or hole was packed with grease and
grit and went round and round. This metaphorically referred to the failure of the
‘wheel of life’ (dharma cakra) to run smoothly when under the influence of
‘ignorance’ (avijjā/avidyā). The Buddha did not invent the term dukkha/duhkha but
drew it from pre-Buddhist thought. In the Manu-Smrti,3 for example, one of the
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many meanings that is given is ‘the hole made by an arrow’—indicating yet again
something ‘sharp’, ‘painful’, and ‘unpleasant’. If we require a one-word translation
of the term dukkha/duhkha then ‘unsatisfactoriness’ comes the closest.
The investigation of dukkha/duhkha, it should be noted, is the starting point of
all Indian soteriology, not just of the Buddhist tradition.
Throughout a large number of Indian traditions, including Buddhism, a
medical analogy is employed that states human existence is afflicted by an
illness—that illness is termed dukkha/duhkha. Like those before him, the Buddha
chooses to begin his investigation here. Moreover, within most Buddhist traditions
the Buddha is likened to a ‘spiritual doctor’ who diagnoses the illness of
dukkha/duhkha and, this is the important aspect, prescribes a regimen that allows
one to return to health.
Christian missionaries, theologians and Indologists in the nineteenth
century, however, by and large disseminated the view that Buddhism inculcated a
submission to suffering and a longing for extinction expressed in the nihilism of
Nibbāna/Nirvāna. The great Sanskrit scholar Monier Williams4 in 1889 condemned
the perceived nihilism of Buddhism and asked the following rhetorical question:
Which book shall we clasp to our hearts in our last hour—the book that tells us
of the dead, the extinct, the death-giving Buddha, or the book that reveals to us
the living, the eternal, the life-giving Christ? (Williams 1889)

For others Buddhism was the ‘most unmitigated system of pessimism the world
has perhaps ever seen’ (Kellogg 1885). What provoked such ire was Buddhism’s
atheistic stance together with its alleged nihilism. This view, however, can be
viewed as a projection onto the ‘Other’ of a defining feature of Western civilisation
itself: the belief that the endurance of suffering is meaningful and redemptive. It is
to the credit of Friedrich Nietzsche, rather than any nineteenth-century Indologist,
that he was able to understand that the attitude to human suffering constituted
the most significant difference between Buddhism and the Christianity he was
familiar with.
Without blaming themselves or others, the Buddha urged human beings to
summon up their energies and work out their freedom and happiness—before
death. His last words, reported in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta were:
Everything compounded is evanescent - strive on untiringly.5
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 211

A group of Jains told the Buddha that they practised self-mortification because
they believed that suffering produces happiness. The Buddha told them that this
view contradicted itself. How can one achieve happiness through suffering? He
had, he told them, found a way of winning happiness through happiness.6
Buddhism takes on, therefore, a distinctly ‘this-worldly’ character in its quest
for freedom and happiness and this is expressed in clear and unambiguous terms
in the Rohitāssa Sutta.7 The genre of this discourse, classified among discourses
with devas, is a brilliant didactic device. The Buddha’s interlocutor is a deva, a ‘god’
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called Rohitāssa. A disincarnate celestial being comes down to earth and seeks
instruction from a corporeal being. With superb irony, the concept of deva is made
to deconstruct itself. Rohitāssa has flown through the air to reach the end of the
world but—no such end could be found. Thereafter, without stopping to eat or
drink, he has sped backwards and forwards across aeons, but could not reach the
end of time. Rohitāssa’s ‘restless spirit’ was still seeking an answer to this
conundrum. So he approached the Buddha and asked:
Is it possible, venerable sir, by travelling to know or to see or to reach the end of
the world, where one is not born, does not age, does not die, does not pass
away, and is not reborn?

The question was formulated in terms of an average person’s longing for another
world, which is not circumscribed by space and time. The answer given was in
itself a brilliant diagnosis of the human psyche, which longs for something better
after death, something eternal, permanent and unchanging. The Buddha
responds to Rohitassa in the following way:
As to that end of the world, friend, where one is not born, does not age, does not
pass away, and is not reborn—I say that it cannot be known, seen, or reached by
travelling . . . However, friend, I say that without having reached the end of the
world there is no making an end to suffering. It is, friend, in just this fathom-long
carcass endowed with perception and mind that I make known the world, the
origin of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world.7

Thus, the end of suffering or ‘unsatisfactoriness’ is not to be found in some other

place but in this world. The Buddha’s reply is a movement away from the religious
responses of his time to the problem of suffering and to those found outside the
India of his day. It could be speculated that the question is placed in the mouth of
a supernatural being to point out the emptiness of the supernatural. The Buddha
appears to dismantle the binary opposition ‘nature/super-nature’ before giving his
answer: the rise and cessation of perceptions and ideas are indissolubly linked
with the birth, growth and dissolution of ‘this fathom long carcass’ (i.e., the
physical form of the individual). The ‘metaphysical’ the Buddha claims, both here
and many other places within the Pāli canon, is a delusion produced by craving;
the metaphysical is thus seen as part of the problem, not its solution.
The figure Siddhattha Gotama, known by the epithet ‘Buddha’, ‘awoke’8 by
his own effort. It is the Buddha’s awakening—word Buddha is derived from
 212 JOHN PEACOCK

a Pali/Sanskrit root meaning ‘to wake up’—without intercession that has been a
primary motivational force for Buddhist practitioners for two and a half millennia.
For, if the figure Siddhattha Gotama can achieve awakening, the way was open to
others to achieve the same end by their own dedicated efforts. Moreover, the
Buddha himself encouraged his followers to:
live as islands . . . being your own refuge, with no one else as your refuge, with
the Dhamma as an island, with the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other
refuge.9
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The Dhamma/Dharma was to be the refuge because this was the ‘way things
were’ and this is what a Buddha had ‘woken up’ to. It was the injunction to
‘wake up’ that the Buddha ceaselessly repeated to his followers over his 45-year
dispensation. The content of this awakening was to ‘awake’ to the true nature
about the way things were rather than dwelling in some fictional fantasy about
the way you would like them to be. It was the ‘desire’ for things to be otherwise
than they actually were that the Buddha pinpointed as the origin of human
malaise in the world.
To encourage his followers to ‘awaken’ themselves’ the Buddha delineated a
methodology so that they could discern for themselves what he had discovered
through experimentation and great struggle. He called this the Middle Way of the
‘Four Ennobling Truths’.10 These truths are ‘ennobling’ because one is ‘ennobled’ by
enquiring into suffering or unsatisfactoriness. It not that suffering, or unsatisfactori-
ness is in itself ‘Noble’. An individual, so the Buddha says, does not gain nobility by
merely suffering. To repeat, it is the enquiry into the possibility of overcoming
suffering or unsatisfactoriness that is ennobling.
The Pāli Canon contains hundreds of discourse delivered by the Buddha
over the course of his long teaching career; however, in many ways all these
teachings can be seen as clarifications of these Four Ennobling Truths in their
theoretical aspects, or practical guidelines for living according to them.
The Buddha begins his analysis in the following way:
Now this, bhikkhus,11 is the ennobling truth of the origin of suffering: birth
suffering, ageing is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, union with
what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not
to get one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are
suffering. (Bhikkhu Bodhi 2000 1844)

When the Buddha is speaking about suffering in this passage he is referring to the
totality of everything that is unsatisfactory mat occurs in an individual’s life—I shall
return to the brief mention of the five aggregates later in this paper. He goes on to
outline that this suffering/unsatisfactoriness has a cause, that it can cease, and that
there is a path to its cessation.12
If we return briefly to the analogy of the Buddha as a spiritual physician then
the Four Ennobling Truths can be seen as beginning with a diagnosis; there is a
disease and this disease has a cause, which culminates in the good news of a return
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 213

to health—the disease can end and there is a ‘way’ to return to health. The
Buddha, from the point of view of the early tradition, was the physician who
healed himself. Dukkha/Duhkha is the Buddha’s word for the human predicament
and, as was pointed out above, he drew this term from the religio-philosophical
usage of the time, but imbued it with a distinct meaning.13
Nearly all religions offer the possibility of salvation from the dissatisfaction
of temporal and corporeal existence by holding out the promise of a higher
metaphysical plane above that of ordinary existence. However, this often results in
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a form of religious distress where humans experience the world as an alien reality
and a travail of tears. In this condition there is a longing for a state where death
shall be no more and where tears and frustration will be absent. The Buddha
sought to diagnose the cause of religious distress itself. His physician’s scalpel
probed beneath the layers until it touched the ‘self ’—the root cause of existential
anguish, which he termed sankhāra _ dukkha—constructed, or compounded,
suffering. The Buddha attempted to unravel the tragic sense of life that is present
in existential distress, the feeling that one has been ‘thrown’ into an alien world.
Moreover, the Buddha sought a cure for this sense of alienation that is productive
of the emotions of fear and longing. To be human was to be corporeal. Corporeal
conditionality necessarily implies birth, growth, decay and death. The Buddha
discerned upon examination that the religions and philosophies of his time14
provided naive explanations and pseudo solutions for a false predicament into
which humans had manoeuvred themselves. He therefore made a distinction
between different form of dukkha/duhkha, delineating three distinct types—
dukkha-dukkha (physical pain), viparināma dukkha (suffering due to the
_
vicissitudes of life), and sankhāra dukkha (‘Self’—constructed distress).
Dukkha-dukkha refers to physical pain: injury, sickness, discomfort, ageing
and death and so forth. In short, the totality of pain and discomfort that can be
attributed to being corporeal or physical in origin. The Buddha was no stranger to
this type of pain and the canonical tradition does not hide this fact. After his
Awakening the Buddha did not return with a transfigured body. In his later days
particularly, the Buddha suffered from ill health:
And during the rains the Lord was attacked by a severe sickness, with sharp
pains as if he were about to die. But he endured all this mindfully, clearly aware,
and without complaining.15

He lived to the age of 80 years and experienced all of the problems that come with
embodiment. Near the end of his life he even joked about it with good grace:
Ānanda, I am now old, worn out, venerable, one who has traversed life’s path,
I have reached the term of life, which is eighty. Just as an old cart is made to go
by being held together with straps, so the Tathagata’s16 body is kept going by
being strapped up.17

Even the Buddha’s final illness was brought on by food poisoning. His last human
experience was one of intense physical pain and Ānanda, his attendant, who
 214 JOHN PEACOCK

nursed him until his death, remembered how ‘he bore with fortitude the sharp
pain, even unto death’. As far as corporeal existence is concerned, the Buddha was
human, all too human.
It is clear that the Buddha had not found a way of liberation either for
himself or for others from ageing, sickness and death. He did not cure the
incurable or raise the dead to life. The Buddhist tradition ever since the
Buddha’s final demise has never claimed that it could bring an end to physical
pain but only the mental anguish that usually accompanies physical. Note the
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passage cited above how the Buddha, although experiencing intense physical
pain, is said to remain aware, mindful and uncomplaining.
The Buddha proclaimed that all men should die and that there was nothing
remarkable in this. However, he was wearied physically by those around him
asking to know where those who had passed away would be reborn.18 Even the
Buddha it seems could not quell speculation about rebirth. However, he did seek
to bring an end to such speculation by focusing on the corporeal life that we did
know.
As we have seen, the Buddha began his proclamation of the Four Ennobling
Truths with the declaration that:

. . . union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing

is suffering.19

Here the Buddha touches the basis of psychological distress: the emotional pain
experienced by human beings due to the vicissitudes of life. Association with what
is not desired is dukkha/duhkha; separation from what is desired is dukkha.
The Buddha even warned that the euphoria associated with intense meditative
concentration ( jhāna/dhyāna) could be a potential source of sorrow and distress.
The feelings of delight and bliss experienced is dependent on the performance of
certain meditative exercises. If the meditator imagines that these are the
intimations of a transcendental state of bliss and clings to them, they can be a
source of frustration since all feelings are impermanent.

And what, bhikkhus, is the danger in the case of feelings? Feelings are
impermanent, suffering, and subject to change. This is the danger in the case of
feelings.20

The Buddha passed away attended by a few disciples, many of whom were
his kinsfolk. For him and his companions it was an acute reminder of viparināma
dukkha—the dukkha that arises through change. Seeing the grief of those around
him the Buddha sought to assuage it by reminding them that:

. . . all things that are pleasant and delightful are changeable, subject to
separation and becoming other . . . Whatever is born, become, compounded is
subject to decay, it cannot be that it does not decay.21
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 215

The Buddha did not make himself an exception to the rule. Yet it was by clinging
or grasping after the notion of permanence that much of the suffering of the
world was generated.
The first two forms of dukkha are matters of everyday experience. They are
not, as such, ‘Buddhist’ truths. Physical pain and the vagaries of life, together with
life’s frustrations, uncertainties and death, can induce dread and elicit a ‘religious’
response. This can manifest as the search for some kind of unchanging
metaphysical absolute. It is here that certainly early Buddhism, as far as we can
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understand it, parts company with ‘religion’.

What the Buddha declared was that he had broken through to the ‘birth-
less’ (ajātam) and the ‘a-mortal’ (amatam). By this he did not mean that he had
found a way to an immortal life beyond death. He had discovered that change is
all too real. There is endless birthing, ageing and dying, but there is no reified
transcendental ‘self’ caught up in materiality and temporality. Rather, the ‘self’
(attā/ātman) that was viewed by the religious traditions of the Buddha’s time as
being unitary and unchanging was perceived by the Buddha to be a ‘process’
composed of five interrelated factors or aggregates (khandha/skandha).22 How
could there be ‘death’, if that ‘thing’, the ‘I’ to which birth and death are attributed,
does not possess substantive and unchanging existence? In a sense, all human
beings are tathāgatas—thus come, thus gone—in that they are a constant flux
lacking any fixed element within them. The difference therefore between an
average person and a Buddha and his ‘awakened’ followers (arahat) is that they
live fully awake and alive to this truth; their consciousness fully coincides with the
ineluctable and evanescent flux existence. The moment that consciousness
imagines that it is other than its actual life processes it becomes agitated and
anguished. Sankhāra dukkha is a ‘self-inflicted’ wound. For the Buddha it is not life
that is a mystery, but rather the human attitude to life: each day people die, and
yet we live as if we are immortal.
The Buddha recognised that by turning themselves into ‘things’ inhabiting
bodies, whether you call the ‘thing’, ‘soul’, ‘self’, or ‘consciousness’, humans have
got themselves into an enormous amount of trouble. In traditional Buddhist
cosmology, humans are placed between the ‘gods’ and the animals and possess
neuroses that neither of the other two categories seem to possess:
Just as it does not occur to flies as they are born along on a pingo or a basket:
‘This is permanent or steadfast or eternal for us’ and moreover, wherever it may
be that these are living, it is there that these flies enjoy themselves. In the same
way, householder, it does not occur to those gods either to think: this is
permanent or steadfast or eternal for us.23

Joseph Campbell, in his last recorded interview—he was terminally ill at the
time—explained this view point of the Buddha as follows: human beings torment
themselves about the meaning of life,” however, what matters is the rapturous
experience of being alive.
 216 JOHN PEACOCK

Once a split between consciousness and the actual life process ensues,
according to the Buddha, human beings experience dis-stress. The individual
experiences its consciousness as ‘other’ than its empirical life processes.
It thinks, or rather fantasises, that the ‘I’ is other than be-ing, (i.e., existence-in-
itself) Once be-ing is conceptualised as Being-in-itself, Non-being opens up like
a chasm.
The Buddha describes the panic that overwhelms an individual when the
notion ‘I am’ arises in him. For the Buddha, the clearer the idea ‘I am’, the greater
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the agitation in the one who would be other than the conditions of its existence.
This delusion was personified as Māra by the Buddha:
He who imagines is bound by Māra.
He who does not imagine, is freed from the evil one.
I aim—this is an imagining. I shall not be—this is an imagining. This I am—that is
an imagining.
I shall be—this is an imagining. I shall not be—this is an imagining.
Embodied shall I be. Formless shall I be.
I shall be conscious. I shall be unconscious. Neither consciousness or unconsc-
iousness shall I be.
This imagining is a disease, imagining is an abscess, a barb.
‘I am’ is an agitation.
‘I am’ is a palpitation.
‘I am’ is a delirium.
‘I am’ is finally a conceit.24

The idea of the ‘self’—‘I am’ arises under specific conditions—it is the result of a
process of subjectification that goes hand-in-hand with the constitution of ‘others’
as objects. The child interacting with its environment learns to constitute itself as
an ‘I’ by distinguishing itself from other-others, as Not-I, ‘Not-me’ and ‘Not-mine’.
This self-differentiating self identifies itself by the linguistic sign ‘I’. The Upanisads,
the two earliest of which the Buddha was familiar with, carry the trace of this
process by which a ‘This’ identifies itself as ‘I’ and names itself, producing the
illusion of a sovereign transcendental self:
In the beginning this world was just a single body (ātman) shaped like a man.
He looked around and saw nothing but himself. The first thing he said was ‘Here I
am!’ and from that the name ‘I’ came into being. Therefore even today when you
call someone, he first says, ‘It’s I’, and then states whatever other name he may
have.25

The Buddha called the ‘I am’ simply ‘a conjuror’s trick’,26 and implied that from the
notion of a self as an unconditioned consciousness arose the idea of some kind of
Spirit or absolute mind. It was out of this reification process into substantive
entities that a certain form of sankhāra dukkha arose. However, this was not the
entire story, for the Buddha delineated other sources of sankhāra dukkha.
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 217

According to the Buddha, one of the paramount causes for violence in the
world is delusions produced by a subject-centred view or opinions—ditthi. Views
__
or opinions, as the Buddha explained them, are not solely ‘ideologies’ in the sense
of logically coherent systems of thought that proceed from an assumed first
premise. The Buddha’s understanding or ditthi—views—encompasses ideologies
__
in this sense: they are ‘views hammered out by reason’.27 But the central thrust of
his critique of views—be they ‘philosophical’ or ‘common-sense’—is that they
produce distorted or partial views of reality. Dit thi is really a distorted manner of
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__
perceiving the world. There are formalised views arranged into ideological
systems of thought and then there are each person’s outlook on life, which is
reflected in his or her conduct. Views appeal to individuals, and they are clung to
because, from the Buddhist perspective, they reflect collective fantasies.
The Buddha repeatedly referred to views, as ‘impediments’ and ‘hindrances’.
In the Brahmajāla Sutta the Buddha lists 62 views that he considered hindrances to
the pursuit of liberation because they substitute thinking for empirically verifiable
praxis. He ultimately summed these up 10 indeterminate and unanswerable/-
unanswered questions—avyākatāni. These are:
1– 2 Is the world eternal or not eternal?
3– 4 Is the world infinite or not?
5– 6 Is the self or life-principle ( jı̄vam) the same as the body or not?
7– 10 Does the Tathāgata (a) exist, (b) not exist, (c) both exist and not exist,
(d) neither exist nor not exist after death.28

The Buddha refused to delve into these matters because they could not be
resolved through empirical investigation. They invariably produce a multiplicity of
opinions and lead to disputes and quarrels that often escalate into violent conflict.
Clinging tenaciously to such non-verifiable views leads, from a Buddhist
perspective, to people becoming querulous and confrontational. Contending
parties often declare ‘This alone is true’.29
The Buddha condemned the obsessive craving to monopolize the truth
because of the suffering that often resulted from such dogmatism. In the
Madhupindika Sutta30 the Buddha pointed out that war was merely a continuation
of verbal disputes in violent form:
Why do the disputants that assert themselves to be the only experts proclaim
different truths? have many different truths been heard of, or do they follow
their own reasoning? There are not many different truths but different fixed
perceptions of the world; but having reasoned on views they proclaim a double
dhamma: truth and falsehood . . . Tenacious in their views they enter into
disputes in the world. But if obstinacy is given up nobody will encourage strife in
the world.31

By positing a single truth, an enunciating subject establishes himself/herself as the

competent speaker and goes on to establish a hierarchy of ‘truths’, and people
 218 JOHN PEACOCK

become pigeon-holed according to their views and beliefs. It is not surprising that
the Buddha often compared views to barbs and spoke of dogmatists as wagers of
wordy warfare, wounding each other with ‘daggered-tongues’.
The Buddha’s refusal to enter into disputes about the truth of ‘views’—
ditthi—was not due to a liberal laissez faire attitude, but because it would be an
__
exercise in vanity, in both senses of the word. In his diagnosis of the relentless
quest for final truths and ultimate meaning as ditthi tanhā, the Buddha anticipated
__
Freud’s disclosure of philosophical and religious views as products of a desire for
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mastery or ‘will-to-power’.
The word for sensual desire in Pali and Sanskrit is kāma. However, the word
that is used by the Buddha to indicate that which is productive of dukkha is tanhā.
This is not ordinary desire or kāma, but is a diagnostic term that encompasses the
drives of the ego. Etyrnologically it means ‘thirst’, but it is not like a physical
thirst—pipāsa—that be quenched. Tanhā indicates a need that by its very nature
cannot be satisfied. ‘Thirst’ is an apposite metaphor for this ‘desire for being’,
because our earliest life-need expresses itself as thirst or a desire ‘to-be’. It is a
distortion or the vitiation of the instinct for survival into a drive, which tends to
reproduce itself through the reproduction of a subject and objects of desire.
Tanhā represents a compulsion to re-become and could be translated as ‘tending
to rise again and again, repeating, recurring’.
The Buddha Dhamma is misapprehended if it is seen as a metaphysical or
ontological philosophy. It can be accurately described as an incisive diagnosis of
the pathology of desire. It sees itself as exposing or disclosing the disease that
produces ontological and essentialist systems of thought. From this perspective
the elimination of suffering requires not a definition of the nature of ‘Being’ and
‘non-Being’, but insight into the conditions that create the delusion that human
beings are eternally tossed back and forth between the Scylla of existence and the
Charybdis of non-existence. The ocean in which the hapless ego is tossed hither
and thither is disclosed by the Buddha as being desire.
In the Mahāvedella Sutta the Buddha’s foremost disciple Sariputta offers a
lucid exposition of the pathology of desire. In this Sutta he claims that all ‘realities’
are the products of desire and desire is diagnosed as a threefold drive—greed,
aversion and delusion. He goes on to insist that:
Greed is something, aversion is something, delusion is a something . . . Greed is a
maker of signs, aversion is a maker of signs, delusion is a maker of signs.32

What he is saying is that ‘things’ are perceived as objects of greed, aversion and
delusion because they are productive of the measurable—pamānakarano. Due to
the delusion produced by desire, the mind cannot perceive dispassionately. It
‘measures’ or evaluates ‘things’ in terms of good or bad (for me). What causes this,
Sariputta asks, and answers: nimittakarano— by way of signification—literally
‘by sign-making’. As signs, every percept becomes a signifier. When percepts are
seen as they are becoming, and not as signs, they cease to be signifiers of desire.
They are empty! As signs, they are full—of desire. Thus, under the power of desire
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 219

everything becomes a sign; the desire-driven individual experiences everything as

signifiers of greed or aversion.
What conditions this is delusion—the failure to recognise the becoming-
ness and evanescence of ‘things’. Under the gaze of desire everything loses its
innocence. Things are no longer perceived as ‘signs’, only when desire is
eradicated. To understand early Buddhist thought we have to understand the
pathology and semiotics of desire, not the ontologies of the mind. The goal of the
path as it is stated in the Mahāvedalla Sutta is to realise the ‘sign-less deliverance
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of the mind’.
The Buddha diagnosed three forms in which desire is active, and developed
a dynamic model of tanhā as a drive. This provided insight into the internal
tensions or torsions that it produces in the self, once it imagines that it is a fixed
and permanent entity amidst change.
Desire is threefold: namely, desire for sense pleasures (kāma), desire for being
(bhava), desire for non-being (vibhava).33

The Buddha explained that he taught a Dhamma that is according to the

flow of actuality and against the flow of desire. It is common to identify kāma with
the five senses and specifically with sexual desire. If one remains faithful to the
unambiguous elucidations given by the Buddha on the genesis of consciousness,
one can no longer speak of the five ‘physical’ senses and the mind. This insinuates
into Buddhist thought the metaphysical assumption that the living being is a
mind/body dyad. Western ego psychology, in particular, falls into this trap when it
speaks of the human being as a psycho/somatic entity. The Buddha, on the other
hand, speaks of six senses. He insists that contact and feeling have a sixfold sense
base. All of the six senses touch and feel. The Buddha does not speak in terms of
mentality—materiality when he discusses nāma-rūpa. ‘Matter’ is a concept based
on the feeling of grossness. It is not a gross ‘thing-in-itself’. Form (rūpa) can be
‘gross’—external—and ‘fine’—internal. In fact, according to the Buddha, all the
forms we perceive are constructs. Percepts enable the formation of concepts—
‘material’, ‘immaterial’ or ‘spiritual’. This is one of the central lessons taught in the
Mūlapariyāya Suttar.34 A person, it is said, who is untrained in the Dhamma on the
basis of a diversity of contact has a variety of feelings: ‘solid’, ‘fluid’, ‘hot/cold’,
‘motion’. These are then conceptualised and named as ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘fire’ and
‘wind’. This leads to the reification of ‘five great elements’. The untrained person
perceives not only external ‘things’ but also has mental images such as ‘Pajāpati’,
‘Brahmā’, ‘plane of infinite space’, ‘plane of infinite consciousness’, ‘unity’,
‘diversity’, ‘universality’. He or she then conceptualises them and then goes on to
conceptualise himself or herself ‘in’, or ‘apart from’, them. Then comes the
moment of appropriation—he/she says of them ‘This is mine’. He or she then
‘delights in them’.35 It is clear that the Buddha makes no distinction between
objects of the five sense and the mind. ‘Earth’ is as much a mental construct as
‘Brahmā’, and both lead to delight.36 Delight produces both the ego and the
object together with its attendant clinging and craving to both.
 220 JOHN PEACOCK

Delight produces a sense of self and the other that propels the self into
claiming ‘This is mine’. Self-reproduction therefore is inextricably bound to the
reproduction of the other; be it ‘mundane’ as the earth, or ‘sublime’ as Brahmā.
The ego and its objects are mutually conditioning ‘factors’ or ‘fabrications’.
The hidden genitor of both is the desire for delight or pleasure and the avoidance
of un-pleasure. The ego sees reflections of his/her desire in every other thing and
being. This absorption of the elf in itself is diagnosed by the Buddha as
asmichanda—‘I’ excitement.37
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If desire of the pleasurable (kāma tanhā) is a basic drive, how can we explain
the impulse towards self-abnegation, self-mortification and the extreme forms of
torture often practised by ascetics? In the story of the Buddha’s life38 it is said that
the Buddha tried these practice and found them ‘ignoble and vulgar’. In the
Mahādukkhakhandha Sutta,39 the Buddha provides an illuminating insight into this
practice. The motive that impels individuals to inflict pain on themselves or endure
hardship and deprivation, is the desire for pleasure. Pleasure is repressed or denied
in order to gain pleasure in the long term. The Buddha gives the example of a
young man who is driven by ambition to make a success of his life. He determines
to learn a craft or a profession, make a fortune and start a family. He willingly
endures cold and heat, undergoes other hardships and lives thriftily in order to
achieve this goal. The Buddha then makes the remarkable comment:
This is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of suffering visible here
and now, having sensual pleasures as its cause, sensual pleasures as source,
sensual pleasures as its basis—the cause being simply sensual pleasure.40

The entire Mahādukkhakhandha Sutta is a systematic exposition of the

relationship between the craving for pleasure, the desire for self-aggrandisement,
and the mass of suffering in the world. The Buddha cuts through the pseudo-
distinction between ‘this worldly’ and ‘other worldly’ asceticism. The man who
denies himself in order eventually to make a success in life and the ascetic who
mortifies himself in order to have paranormal powers, or the desire to be united
with an Ultimate Reality, for example, are both driven by a desire for pleasure and
self-realisation.
Desire is the pro-genitor of the ego and the other. Forms are reified and
externalised by naming them. Both are constructs—sankhāra—and are therefore
impermanent. Both are fictions of desire and are without substance. The desire for
what is bereft of substance ineluctably produces frustration. In the Mahādukkha-
khandha Sutta, the Buddha describes the probable outcome of the ambitious
young man’s self-sacrificing pursuit of success; all his efforts could end in dismal
failure He would then,
. . . grieve, mourn . . . fall into disillusionment and lament: ‘Indeed, my exertion
is vain, indeed my striving is fruitless’. This too is danger, peril in the pleasure of
the senses.41
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 221

Or, on the other hand, he may make a great success of his endeavours, amass a vast
fortune and raise a large family. But then he becomes agitated at the thought that
the wealth acquired by so much hardship might be plundered by kings or robbers,
destroyed by fire or flood, or fall into hands of heirs whom he dislikes. This too, the
Buddha comments, ‘is a danger in the case of the pleasure of the senses’.42
Such ambitions are propelled by crude evaluations about success in life. But
the Buddha also targets more subtle ambitions that dress themselves up as goals
in life, which are far superior to those of the common hedonist; these are desire-
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driven quests for moral superiority and spiritual delights. The young man
disillusioned by worldly ambitions might well long for success in the religious or
spiritual spheres. The objects of pleasure are shifted, but the ego-centred drive for
success is not.
What the Buddha realised was that we humans could only live non-injurious
lives, hurting neither ourselves nor others, nor ourselves and others, if we liberate
ourselves from the ‘objects’ within and without produced by the desire for
pleasure, the desire for being and the desire for non-being.
Closely associated with tanhā, as its soul mate, is upādāna—grasping and
clinging. Upādāna is derived from upa þ ā þ dā. Its nominative form is upādāna—
clinging. It has a dual connotation—that which inflames tanhā, and that which
tanhā consumes or clings to. It is everything by which the process of tanhā is kept
going: fuel, supply, provision, base, substratum. Associated with upādāna is
upādhi even though its derivation is different—upa þ dhā.
Upādhi has two distinct shades of meaning. Primarily, in accordance with its
etymology, it means ‘foundation’, ‘basis’, ‘ground’, ‘substratum’ or ‘support’.
Secondarily, in its canonical usage, it often stands for one’s possessions—wife and
children, flocks and herds, silver and gold, and soon. Perhaps the term ‘assets’ will do
justice to both senses, since assets are ‘things’ laid by that one ‘relies on’ as ‘supports’.
Upādhi covers the whole gamut of footholds or assets, which culture
provides for measuring self-identity: gender, nationality, ethnicity, rank, occupation,
power, wealth and status symbols. Upādāna is a disease that, from this viewpoint,
distorts all of the senses. Once ego-consciousness arises, sense experience is over-
determined by reactive responses of lust, revulsion or indifference. The six senses
become tentacles that lash out to grab and wrap themselves around whatever
excites desire, to suck them into the octopus like ego. They also lash out to strike
and destroy whatever threatens the ego’s existence.
Upādāna—clinging—is both a bond and a binding: nothing is enjoyed as it
is, it must be had. When this is frustrated, the suffering of depression arises. A sense
of proprietorship arises with the illusion of ‘thing-hood’. A perceived form is
conceived in terms of a hidden essence, vested with signification, named as such
and processed in terms of one’s desires or antipathies. As the Buddha says in the
Sutta Nipāta:
In the world, inclusive of its gods, substance is seen in what is insubstantial. They
are tied to their psycho-physical beings and so they think that there is some
 222 JOHN PEACOCK

substance, some reality in them. But whatever be phenomenon through which

they seek their self-identity, it turns out to be transitory. It becomes false, for
what lasts for a moment is deceptive.43

The triggering mechanisms tanhā and upādāna produce and reproduce fictions
and suffering: ‘The world lacks and hankers: beings are enslaved by greed
(tanhādaso)’. For the Buddha, the real outcastes (dasas)44 are not a social
underclass, out those who are the slaves of tanhā.
After a careful study of the symptoms the Buddha tracked the disease to its
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source. In the third of the Ennobling Truths, the Buddha states what the cure
should be:
This is the Ennobling Truth of the stopping of dukkha; the utter passionless
stopping of tanhā, its renunciation, surrender, release, the lack of pleasure in it.45

The Buddha used the term nibbāna/nirvāna—for the total cessation or

non-inflammation of desire. When desire is eradicated, there is a spontaneous
upsurge of feelings of dispassion towards self and compassion for others.
The Buddha’s Way (magga) is aimed at the total eradication of desire in order
to come to a direct experience of life as a process of physiological activities, feeling
and perceiving, unfettered by concepts and signs. Freedom from desire makes
consciousness ‘non-representative’. Awakened awareness is seen as something that
breaks open and sees through the codes by which culture computes actuality,
but does not replace them with a new code. In the Buddhist tradition there is a
distinction made between two types of knowledge: anubodha, which is ‘knowing
according to ’(that is to say, knowledge according to a particular view or with the aid
of concepts), and, pativedha—‘penetrating knowledge without names and labels’.
The Buddha did not offer his followers a soporific, which would bring them
temporary relief from distress and suffering or make them briefly oblivious of
everyday problems. That would have been liberation through narcosis. The term
used by the Buddha for training oneself in the art of living is bhāvanā. It is
generally translated as ‘meditation’. Meditation in Western usage (Christian)
generally connotes contemplation of ‘eternal’ or ‘revealed truths’, or pondering
over the words of a saint or a sage. The aim of bhāvanā, however, is to achieve
mindfulness (sati); a state of focused wakefulness that is receptive to whatever
is arising in the individual’s psycho-physical continuum. This becomes a way of
training that allows the individual to enjoy the senses without being caught in the
threefold desire of greed, aversion and delusion.
Nibbāna is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive, and is thus an
affirmation of life rather than its negation. The Buddha himself was accused by his
adversaries of being ‘perverted [and one] who lays down the cutting off, the
annihilation and destruction of essential being’.46 The Buddha responds to the
charge in the following way, and it is worth quoting in full.
. . . some samanas and brahmins—wrongly erroneously, and falsely—charge
me, in defiance of facts, with being an annihilationist and with preaching the
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 223

disintegration, destruction and extinction of existing creatures. It is just what

I am not and what I do not affirm, that is wrongly, erroneously and falsely
charged against me by these good people who make me out to be an
annihilationist. Both in the past and today, I have explained dukkha and the
ending of dukkha. If people abuse, revile and denounce the Tathāgata for this, it
begets in him no resentment, annoyance or dissatisfaction.47

With regard to the suggestion that Buddhism inculcates a negative attitude

towards the world, where the world is seen as distasteful or repulsive, the Buddha
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claims that those who are liberated from dukkha experience a state that is termed
‘the Beautiful, [and] know everything as beautiful’.48
Living in the passing now, experiencing life simply as the passing passage of
all phenomena, does not produce, according to the tradition, anxiety but bliss
because there is the realisation that little if anything is worth ‘clinging to’. In Indian
religion the Buddha was the first perceptive observer who realised that the totality
as it presents itself to human perception and representation is a product of a
thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can. Onto-theology
or philosophical appropriation is different form the artistic, religious and scientific
appropriations of the world. They remain nonetheless, from this perspective,
human appropriations. Failing to recognise this constructed and practical character
of reality, humans cling to it and produce their own frustrations and distress.
The will to believe that the representation is real, and the metaphors are
signifiers of transcendental truths, is, according to the Buddha, born of desire.
When desire is destroyed, deluded consciousness is deconstructed and there is
said to arise the joyous experience of the vibrant life-energies that exceed
the constricting boundaries of the ego. The Awake person sees through the
asphyxiating artifices of desire and sees actuality in its suchness (tathā).
The Buddha’s Way to Freedom, is based on a wholly empirical premise: the
‘self’ as a fixed and unchanging phenomena is a fiction—so there is ‘no-thing’
which is born or dies; there is only pure activity and flux but no actors. What was
constructed can be un-constructed. What was made can be unmade. Speculation
can be set aside and real living can begin:
There is a not-born (ajatām), non-constructed (asarikhatam), not made (akatam).
If there was not that non-born, not made, not constructed, there would be no
escape from what is born, become, made, constructed. The stepping out from
that, the peaceful, beyond reasoning, everlasting, the not-born, the non-
produced, the sorrow-less that is void of stain, the cessation of states linked to
suffering; the stilling of constructions is bliss.49

This declaration has sometimes been understood as a possible reference to a

Being or a Reality-in-itself existing beyond or behind the appearances of change.
It has led to speculations that the Buddha may have had a transcendental
experience of an absolute, unconditioned reality. But when the words of the
Buddha are understood in his own terms, it is clear that he is speaking
 224 JOHN PEACOCK

of dismantling the constructions of desire. Nibbāna/Nirvāna is not a hope of

happiness beyond the threshold of death. Nibbāna is considered by the Buddha to
be freedom and happiness realised in the here and now. This is the goal which the
Buddha believes is open to all, irrespective of sex or caste.

NOTES
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1. The first instance cited is in Pāli whilst the second is Sanskrit. This procedure will
be followed throughout the paper.
2. This example is to be found in the Rg Veda.
_
3. Manu Smrti, 9.43.
_
4. Monier-Williams was the compiler of one of the first Sanskrit dictionaries, a work
that is still invaluable in the study of Sanskrit today.
5. Dı̄gha Nikāya, II.156. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are the author’s
own. However, as with all translations, an enormous debt is owed to those who
have gone before.
6. Majjhima Nikāya, I.94.
7. Samyutta Nikāya, II.61 – 62.
_
8. The term ‘Buddha’ is far better translated as ‘An Awakened One’ rather than as
‘Enlightened One’.
9. Dı̄gha Nikāya, II.100.
10. ‘Ennobling Truths’ or ‘Truths of the Noble Ones’ is to be much preferred to
‘Noble Truth’, which as the distinguished Pāli scholar and ex-President of the Pali
Text Society Professor K. R. Norman points out is the very worst of all the
possible translations of Cattāri Ariyasāccani—A Philological Approach to
Buddhism (Norman 2006).
11. A bhikkhu is a Buddhist monk belonging to the order of monks founded by
the Buddha. More accurately the word ‘bhikkhu’ means ‘sharer’; that is, one
who shares what is collected on the alms realm or the sharing of the
Dhamma/Dharma.
12. In their Pali formulation, the Four Ennobling Truths are as follows: (1) Dukkha
Ariyasacca; (2) Dukkha Samudaya Ariyasacca; (3) Dukkhanirodha Ariyasacca; and
(4) Dukkhanirodhagāminı̄pattipadā Ariyasacca.
_
13. Richard Gombrich in his work Theravāda Buddhism, describes dukkha as the
Buddha’s ‘problem situation’ (32 –59)
14. See Digha Nikāya (The Long Discourses of the Buddha, translated by Maurice
Walshe, 1987); Particularly the Brahmajala Sutta, which lists 62 philosophies
extant during the Buddha’s lifetime.
15. Dı̄gha Nikāya, II.99.
16. A synonym for the Buddha. The term is obscure and means literally. ‘Thus come,
thus gone.’ The Buddha always refers to himself as the Tathāgata.
17. Dı̄gha Nikāya, II.100.
18. Ibid., II.94.
 AETIOLOGY OF SUFFERING IN EARLY BUDDHISM 225

19. Samyutta Nikaya, V. Mahāvagga, 421.

_
20. Majjhima Nikāya, I.90. Ko ca bhikkhave vedānānam ādı̄navo: yam vedanā aniccaā
_
dukkhā viparināmadham, ayam vedānānam ādinava.
_ _
21. Dı̄gha Nikāya, II.158.
22. The five aggregates are form (rūpa), feelings or sensations (vedanā), perception-
discrimination (san
n
), volitional formations (sankhāra) and consciousness
_


(vi
nnāna). These five interdependent factors are processes upon which the
notion of a self is posited. In reality there is no fixed and unchanging ‘I’, only
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these five processes.

23. Majjhima Nikāya, II.93.
24. Samyutta Nikāya, IV.133– 4.
_
25. Brhadāranyaka Upanisad, I.4.I.
_ _ _
26. Samyutta Nikāya, III.142.
_
27. Dı̄gha Nikāya, I.23.
28. Dı̄gha Nikāya, I.189.
29. Sutta Nipāta, 832.
30. Majjhima Nikāya, 108 – 114.
31. Ibid., 879 –886.
32. Majjhima Nikāya, I.298.
33. Digha Nikāya, III.216. Tisso tanhā: kāma tanhā, bhava tanhā, vibhava tanhā.
_ _ _ _
34. The Mūlapariyāya Sutta is the opening Sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya.
35. Majjhima Nikāya, I.1.
36. Ibid.
37. Majjhima Nikāya, I.109.
38. The Buddha’s life story is basically a hagiography put together many centuries
after his death. In the Pāli Nikāyas, the Buddha discloses tantalising snippets about
his background. His dwelling with ascetics and practising self-mortification is one
such piece of information that he discloses.
39. Majjhima Nikāya, I.86 – 90.
40. Ibid., 84– 85.
41. Majjhima Nikāya, I.113.
42. Ibid.
43. Sutta Nipāta, 756 – 757.
44. Indian society at the time of the Buddha was divided into four social categories
(varna) based on the notion of metaphysical purity. Outside this system, which
later evolved into the caste system ( jāti), was an underclass who were slaves,
known as the dasas. Northern Indian society was dominated by the Āryans
whose language was based on Sanskrit. The word ‘Aryan’ means ‘noble’, and
those that were born into āryan society were noble by birth whilst those who
were born outside āryan society were considered unclean and ignoble.
The Buddha redefines all of the social categories, making ‘purity’ and ‘nobility’ a
matter of virtue not of birth.
45. Dı̄gha Nikāya, II.16.
46. Majjhima Nikāya, I.180.
 226 JOHN PEACOCK

47. Ibid., I.181.

48. Digha Nikāya, III.34.
49. Itivuttika, 43.

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_
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_
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John Peacock, 8 Alfreda Avenue, Hollywood, Birmingham, B47 5BP.

E-mail: john@johnpeacock.orangehome.co.uk.