Quotes & Sayings About Dukkha

Life is suffering" is misleading for at least two reasons. First, the Buddha used an ancient Indian language similar to Sanskrit called Pali, and the word he used in Pali for the first noble truth, dukkha, is difficult to translate. Dukkha is too multifaceted and nuanced a term to be captured in the one-word translation "suffering." And second, the fact of dukkha in our lives doesn't mean that life is only dukkha. — Toni Bernhard

Even when people aren't suffering from illness or aging, our unfulfilled cravings and the cessation of temporary pleasures, as well as the dissonance between our expectations and reality, lead to dukkha. — Sara Wilson

It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us. - Tilopa — Lama Surya Das

Siddhartha Gautama said that "life has dissatisfaction" (dukkha). He didn't say that "life is suffering and nothing but suffering" - only that we all suffer in larger or smaller ways. — Doug Kraft

People in the midst of losing their patience are certainly experiencing as aspect of dukkha. — Allan Lokos

Birth leads to death, death precedes birth. So if you want to see life as it really is, it is rounded on both the sides by death. Death is the beginning and death is again the end, and life is just the illusion in between. You feel alive between two deaths; the passage joining one death to another you call life. Buddha says this is not life. This life is dukkha - misery. This life is death. — Rajneesh

the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of "pervasive unsatisfactoriness," I was even more impressed. "Suffering" always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. "Pervasive unsatisfactoriness — Mark Epstein

Subliminally, the Buddha was saying, we are all tending these fires (of greed, hatred, and delusion), motivated as we are by our insecure place in the world, by the feeling, the dukkha, of not fitting in. The fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are defenses against acknowledging that everything is on fire, instinctive attempts at protecting ourselves from what feels like an impossible situation. The Buddha stressed the burning nature of the world in order to show his listeners what they were afraid of. — Mark Epstein

In Buddhism we also interprete Dharma to mean 'cessation,' as in the end of dissatisfaction, the end of dukkha. This is the purpose of Buddha's teachings. — David Michie