This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Meeting Suffering Respectfully; Insight (21) Three Kinds of Suffering. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Hello everyone, and welcome to our meditation at the beginning of the week, as we continue in this series for this year on Samadhi1 and insight. For this meditation, I want to evoke an image from my son’s kindergarten class. Every day when he came to class, we would bring him to school and to the door of the classroom, and the teacher would be standing there in front of the open door. She stood there in what I would say was a dignified, kind, and clear way. A way that felt like the teacher was fully there for what was coming, ready to receive, but also very competent, very calm, clear, organized, and ready for anything.
The teacher would stand right next to the front of the door, and every kindergarten kid who came in, the teacher would greet very nicely. I forget if the teacher shook their hand or how exactly the greeting went, but every kid, every day, would be greeted with this very clear wave from the teacher.
Samadhi is what allows us to be stable, strong, clear, and organized in a certain way, settled in ourselves, so that whatever experience comes our way, we can greet it in the same way. Whatever comes our way, we can see it clearly. We’re not pushed around by it. We’re not caught in it. We’re not defined by it, but we’re just there with it because of this feeling of rootedness, this feeling of being complete and whole here. Each thing that comes our way can be seen, greeted, and respected for what it is. There’s room in the classroom for it; it’s just one seat in the class. It’s not the whole world, just this thing here now.
This applies to suffering. One of the purposes of Samadhi is so that we are not defined by our suffering. One of the purposes of insight, of mindfulness, is so we can know something and not be defined by it, not be pushed around by it. We’re there to know our suffering, to greet it with respect, with clarity, with rootedness—not being defined by it, but ready to be respectful for each act of suffering. So suffering doesn’t become the whole world. Suffering doesn’t become something to reject or to be frightened by, but something that we can see clearly. So clearly that we see that it’s just a piece of the bigger picture of life. It can be big and monumental, but it’s still just one piece. There’s more.
Samadhi provides the “more”—the stability, the wholeness, the calm. And insight provides the “more”—the knowing that is not making it into everything. There is what’s known and the knowing of it. As soon as we see the difference between what’s known and the knowing of it, we start to become free and respectful. We become that teacher at the classroom door that’s ready to greet everything respectfully.
And so suffering is known. Suffering happens within a wholeness of experience. We’re rooted here to know it. And we start seeing that suffering, like everything else, is part of the river of change.
So, assuming a meditation posture, a posture for being rooted, stable on whatever surface holds the weight of your body up—a chair, the floor, a bed, whatever it might be. Feel how the weight of your body settles on the surface that holds it up, the surface where your weight meets the pull of gravity. As you exhale, allow yourselves to settle into the meeting of your weight and the pull of gravity against that surface. Maybe making small adjustments so it’s more comfortable, more rooted here.
And then, arising from that stable, rooted contact, feel the rest of your body. How the weight of your body moves through your torso. If you feel any weight that exists there because of the pull of gravity, as you exhale, relax into that pull. Let your weight settle.
Almost without trying or doing anything, allow your inhale to be fuller, to expand more fully through your torso, your rib cage. Not so much making yourself breathe deeper, but yielding to the in-breath, and then yielding to the exhale, so the exhale is more extended. As you exhale, relax your whole body, a kind of yielding to the pull of gravity, yielding to the desire for tension to unwind.
Then, letting your breathing return to normal.
Now with the inhale, feel any tension, pressure, or forcefulness that might be in the thinking mind. As you exhale, soften the thinking mind. Ever so gently, quiet the thinking voice or slow down the images of thoughts. Rather than living in thoughts, let thinking exist within a wider field of calm spaciousness.
Then settling into the body’s experience of breathing. Without making a lot of effort, or any effort at all, see if you can recognize there is the experience of breathing, and there’s the knowing of it. The knowing of it can be verbal; it can be nonverbal. A very simple, uncomplicated knowing that you’re breathing in, breathing out. A knowing that’s part of being rooted, stable here in this body, here and now.
If, as you’re sitting here, there’s anything that might be called suffering, stress, or emotional discomfort, feel the experience from a rooted, respectful place. Know it, where the knowing is clear, free of what is known. Like a teacher knowing each student coming to the door. The teacher is rooted, clear, fully here, knowing the student clearly, respectfully, but not losing the calm, steady clarity that the teacher wants to convey to the students.
See if you can avoid being defined by your suffering. Let it be part of the larger experience of now. One more thing to know, to greet, and to be ready for the next experience, to be with that.
Watching the smallest movements of the mind, be sensitive to how there might be stress or distress in the mind. And rather than ignoring it because it’s subtle or big, think of yourself standing at the door of the classroom, greeting it while being calm, rooted, clear, where suffering and stress is simply one more thing to greet. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing to get involved in.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, feel whatever degree of stability, calm, or centeredness might be here in the present moment with your body. Imagine meeting the people of the day, going through the experiences of the next 24 hours, greeting each thing as one more thing to greet from a place of stability, clarity, and openness. To know each thing without being defined by it, pushed around by it, or caught in it. Just to stand and be present.
And just maybe that will allow goodwill to be part of your attitude. A field of goodwill, an attitude of goodwill towards yourself, towards others, towards the whole world.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may my Samadhi and insight support me to offer this gift to all beings.
Welcome to the beginning of the week as we continue this series on insight. The three insights that are core to the insight meditation practice are having this deep observation, this deep clarity, this deep recognition of change, of stress, and of non-identification. I choose those words carefully as an alternative to some of the usual ways of talking about these three characteristics, these three insights or recognitions that we have.
The focus currently is the second one, Dukkha.2 The deep recognition, the capacity to recognize, to perceive, to know suffering, stress, and distress in such a way that we find our freedom in it. We find ways in which we can grow spiritually and develop ourselves. Rather than being overwhelmed by suffering, we find a natural way in which the heart, the mind, and the inner life can grow and develop into greater clarity, greater calm, greater care, love, and a greater sense of wholeness by how we recognize and are present for the suffering of our life.
This, of course, is not easy. This is why we’ve done six months already on Samadhi and insight: to prepare the ground for a deep, useful way of engaging with suffering. That long preparation is a way of having a deep respect for suffering, the challenges of it, the difficulty of being with it, but also the opportunities and the richness that’s possible by bringing this practice into the middle of it.
There is a teaching that goes back to the earliest time of Buddhism that says there are three types of Dukkha. The word in Pali,3 the ancient language, is Dukkha (D-U-K-K-H-A). It’s usually translated as “suffering,” but at its core, it means pain—strong discomfort or pain that can be physical, but it can also be emotional. It can also be quite deeply embodied or rooted in us to become the core fuel for how we operate. We are reacting and adjusting to our deep suffering in how we see the world, how we see ourselves, and how we engage in the world.
So the tradition talks about three types of Dukkha, and sometimes it’s helpful to distinguish these three different types. In a sense, there are many, many characteristics of our suffering. There are many kinds of suffering, many ways of understanding it and recognizing it. Different teachers will emphasize different parts. Buddhists have been addressing this issue of Dukkha, of suffering, for 2,500 years. So you can imagine that over time, things have shifted. There have been different interpretations, different recognitions, different ways of working with it, and different emphases. If you go through the history of Buddhist teachings, and even in the modern world, listen to different teachers in different Theravadan traditions—teachers in Burma, teachers in Thailand, teachers in America—you’ll find different teachers emphasizing different aspects of Dukkha. It isn’t that they’re contradicting each other, but that there are just so many different ways of looking at it. The task is to find out how it’s useful for you to see it so that you find yourself not caught in it, not entangled with it, not being undermined or deflated or overwhelmed by it.
There are these three kinds of Dukkha, or three kinds of pain.
The first one, Dukkha-dukkha, is just straightforward, uncomplicated physical pain that can be mild or overwhelming. It’s not there because of our psychology, our psychological reactions, or clinging. It’s not there because we’re caught in attachments. It’s there because it’s just straightforward physical pain. For that, we need to have wisdom to know how to manage it. We have a lot more ways of managing physical pain in the modern world than they had in the ancient world, where the Buddha used the power of his mind to deal with his intense pain as an old man. He would go into deep states of concentration, and he said sometimes that’s the only time he got relief from his old-age pain in the last years of his life. But we need to be wise about it. One way to be wise is not to feel that we have to always endure it or that we should always use our practice to find freedom or relief from it. Sometimes we need medication. Sometimes we need medical care—all kinds of things are useful. But we should not see it as a personal fault. We should not see Dukkha-dukkha as something we need to criticize ourselves for having, but as something we need to be wise about how to live with, handle, and find our way with.
The second is the suffering of change, Viparinama-dukkha. Here, the assumption is that change isn’t always welcome, or that we want change in a way that’s not happening. Change is happening differently than how we want it. Even if change happens in the direction we want, either way, there can be attachment. There’s clinging, and there’s the suffering of clinging to something and then having it change and go away. That clinging then feels frustrated and distraught. So the suffering of change also requires wisdom, but to some degree, it requires the wisdom of acceptance. To some degree, in order to find a way to live at peace, calm, and steady, to be wise, we have to accept the fact that things change. We get old. We get sick. We’ll die. Other people get old, they get sick, they die. The things of our life shift and change in ways that we don’t want, but still, they change. There can be natural disasters that happen in your town, in your neighborhood, and that’s a change. So to be able to somehow navigate the change with ease and calm, without the attachments being a wind drag, without protesting against the very nature of change, which is inherent in this natural world we’re part of—it’s all always changing. Of course, we can have some role in changing things in the right direction. We can have some role in keeping certain things the way they are for a while. We can let our cars last longer by changing the oil or being careful how we drive. We want to be caring and careful, but not be attached. The suffering of change is when we haven’t accepted change as a given and found a wise way to navigate it. So, deep acceptance, no protests against the natural movements of change.
The third, the one that’s really core to Buddhism, is the suffering of the mental formations, Sankhara-dukkha. This is the suffering of craving itself, the suffering of attachment, the suffering of the way that the mind engages in things where there is suffering, tightness, stress, clinging, resistance, pressure, irritation, and annoyance built into the various ways in which we engage and relate to what’s happening in this world. Here is where the practice has the most power to work. Here, we’re not learning to accept things, but we’re learning to or finding a way to have a deep letting go, a deep relaxing of this added layer on top of our life that we contribute. We contribute clinging, grasping, craving, resistance, animosity, hatred, greed, jealousy, envy, covetousness—all kinds of things that we add, all of them characterized by tension, stress, a tightening, a pressure that feels very uncomfortable.
The suffering of mental formations is a suffering which is inherent in the movement of attachment in all its different flavors and forms. It turns out that this is the attachment that is most deep inside of us. For some people, it is the core operating principle from which they live, understand, and define themselves. This is the one that we want to be able to see with a tremendous clarity, with a mind that’s very calm, still, quiet, and rooted. This is the function of insight supported by Samadhi: to be able to get such a feeling of centered calm, a sense of well-being, that we can see some of the deepest places of suffering where we’re holding on tight.
That is one of the great, wonderful paradoxes of this practice: that the deepest suffering we have, we want to prepare ourselves to meet by cultivating a good amount of settled calm and well-being. Our sense of well-being, joy, or happiness that can come with Samadhi and insight becomes the field within which we’re ready to encounter some of the deepest holding and clinging patterns in our life. So this is a path of preparation, of being wise not to address things directly and force our way into a peaceful state. We prepare ourselves, create the conditions, so that we can be present for the deepest clings we have in a way that allows for the deepest letting go of those kinds of mental constructs that involve clinging and attachment.
So, three kinds of Dukkha: Dukkha-dukkha, the Dukkha of change, and the Dukkha of mental formations. Each of them requires a different kind of wisdom, a different approach. It’s not just one way to be with suffering. We have to have some wisdom and understanding of which ones we’re working with.
Thank you. And in this process, may you suffer in a way that supports you to reach the end of suffering. Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or mental collectedness. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism. ↩
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the scriptural language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Viparinama-dukkha: The suffering caused by change. This refers to the stress experienced when a pleasant experience ends or when circumstances change in an undesirable way. ↩
Sankhara-dukkha: The suffering inherent in conditioned states or mental formations. This is the most subtle form of Dukkha, referring to the background unsatisfactoriness of existence due to the impermanent and conditioned nature of all phenomena. ↩