310. The Devastating Mistranslations of dukkha

 
Few alterations of Gotamo's original message have caused as much damage as the (mis)translations of the Pali word dukkha.

The combined net result of out-of-context quotes and inappropriate labelling is that the bottomline of  'Buddhism' is being equated with the statement 'all life is suffering' for the majority of people. It does not require a vast amount of knowledge about Gotamo's teachings or on the subject of the human mind in general in order to recognize how an opinion such as 'all life is suffering' can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy and have devastating consequences.

Both super- and subconscious minds are taking statements that are formulated as commands literally and will execute them once they have entered the system through the conscious mind:

• the subconscious mind will obey the command directly in form of sickness and body problems in general and indirectly by gravitating towards physical situations that contain pain or discomfort
• the superconscious mind will implement the command in three steps: it adopts the viewpoint (such as 'all life is suffering') and if a situation arises that does in fact contain suffering, it will strengthen the viewpoint. After repeated impressions of this kind, the superconscious will then decide that 'life is indeed suffering'. Now, if life does not give reason for suffering already, the superconscious will postulate the occurence of suffering in the future.

• passive circuits will be created by the subconscious mind to automate the identification that goes along with the statement  'all life is suffering',
• entities will attach to those passive circuits that are loaded or primed with mini-postulates containing the self-defeating statement, thus creating 'active' circuits,
• the active circuits (entities) will propagate in one of two ways: cloning or jumping ships to other circuits whether on the same bearer or another being or entity,
• the active circuits will integrate into clusters (or entity mini-organizations) within which they are now even further hidden from direct inspections of the conscious mind,
• the superconscious mind may duplicate the content of the circuit onto a higher level of organization, for example, from individual to his/her family, from there to the city, and, in more cases than it is commonly recognized or acknowledged, to entire nations or ethnic groups (cp.  316. Group Identities).

The 'cause' will always be blamed on whoever happens to be on the other side of the incident that has been postulated, provoked, or 'pulled in', thus strengthening the 'victim' viewpoint and in the wake lowering responsibility.

There are several vicious features of this trap in which a Being can easily be caught when going on this route to disaster, some of which are:
 

• in a condition of suffering, the Being is much less able to work on its liberation and therefore,
• as a side effect it will not confront nor successfully resolve traumatic incidents from the past;
• this trap will enter a downward spiral rather quickly, making it more difficult to escape with every turn;
• other beings and super-beings ('nature') can recognize the condition on the superconscious or group level and either contribute (resulting in more suffering) or dissociate (refusing to help);
• the person will be unable to use the 'meditation path' correctly (which is usually sold as _the_ way of the 'Buddha', and then also as the _only_ way) because the person cannot completely enter the first of the four wholesome states of the mind which is 'sharing love' or 'metta'. It will further merge its _own_ suffering within the second state of the mind ('compassion'), thus likely to _increase_ suffering of others in general rather than to _heal_, and it can certainly not properly enter the third state ('sharing joy').  How could someone who thinks 'all life is suffering' share joy with others in a non-discriminating attitude? Lastly, the forth state of the four wholesome (most often called 'noble') states of the mind, the state of equanimity, a lower harmonic of nibbaana or the 'complete liberation', is beyond their reach, too, because it is a level that is properly reached only in progression after passing through the first three states. (The four states of the mind will be explained in another chapter). Usually, the person will justify this failure and replace the proper state of the mind with emotional (body) states which in the later case will be close to 'dullness' or 'no-interest', thus adding to the motion of the downward spiral of the trap.

The bottom line is that the complete 'truth of dukkha', the first of the four 'noble truth', can only properly be recognized in a liberated state. But then, it should be considered that by recognizing a condition 'as it is'  the condition is automatically resolved ('as-ised').

In this notebook, dukkha will be left mostly untranslated. A close English description in a modern context would be the concept of 'case', a wording that is not too widespread, however. Throughout this book one could safely use the word 'dukkha' whenever the word 'case' has been used.

The word 'in-sanity' would also be an acceptable choice in many cases because it maintains the original structure of the compound word dukkha which literally means 'not wholesome'.

How did the translation 'suffering' enter the scene?  'Suffering' is a consequence of dukkha in very much the same way that 'case' or 'in-sanity' is the cause of the problems that a person has in life.

A person has to realize that it has 'case' before it can do something about it. This is a modern phrasing of the 'first noble truth: the truth of dukkha'. In order to do something about 'case', it has to be understood how it came about in the first place and how it continues to be created. This is obviously the 'second noble truth' of Gotamo. The third one is the truth about resolving 'case', or 'the truth of resolving dukkha'. This is the basic possibility of  what is nowadays called 'clearing' or 'processing'. The forth truth, the 'path to resolving case (dukkha)', would be called 'applied technology' in modern words.

In any case, to close this sad chapter of the notebook with a more positive note, here is  a quote from the Pali Canon about a liberated person:
 

"Whatever had to be done was done.
Whatever could be enjoyed has been enjoyed.
Happiness was achieved through happiness."
 (Theraaghata 63b)