What is dukkha?

Dukkha is a Pali word (duḥkha in Sanskrit) that sits at the centre of the Buddha’s teaching. It is often translated as “suffering”, but it also means unsatisfactoriness, unease, or the sense that something is not quite right.

The first noble truth

In his first teaching, the Buddha said that birth, ageing, sickness and death are dukkha. So are being parted from what we love, meeting what we dislike, and not getting what we want. In short, he said, the five aggregates that we cling to as “me” are dukkha.

This is not a claim that life is only misery. The Buddha also spoke of real pleasures and joys. The point is that none of them can be held on to, and that a mind which clings to them will always be let down in the end.

Three kinds of dukkha

Commentators describe three kinds. The first is plain pain: physical hurt, grief and fear. The second is the dukkha of change: the sadness that comes when something pleasant ends. The third is more subtle. It is the dukkha of conditioned existence itself, because everything that arises depends on causes and will pass away. Nothing made of changing parts can be a lasting refuge.

Where it comes from

The second noble truth gives the cause of dukkha: craving. We want pleasant feelings to last, unpleasant ones to go away, and our sense of self to be secure. Because things are impermanent, that wanting cannot be satisfied.

This gives the teaching its hopeful side. If dukkha has a cause, then it can end when the cause ends. That ending, the third noble truth, is nirvana. The fourth truth is the path that leads there, the Noble Eightfold Path.

Seeing it for yourself

The Buddha described dukkha as something to be fully understood rather than believed. You can start by noticing small moments of dissatisfaction during an ordinary day: impatience in a queue, disappointment when a meal is over, irritation at a noise. Looking closely at these, without blaming yourself or others, is how many people begin to understand the first noble truth from the inside.