Dukkha Is a Wobble

A Physician, Not a Pessimist

When we talk about the teaching of the Buddha, one of the first things people hear is that life is suffering. There is a misunderstanding in that statement — a misunderstanding of what he was actually saying.

You go to a doctor and he tells you that you have an illness. You don't walk out thinking, this man is so negative, he should have told me I am beautiful. The work of a physician is to find out what the problem is, get to the root cause, and find a solution for it.

The Buddha's teaching is very much like that. When he said dukkha, he did not stop at "there is dukkha." He laid out the entire path of how to come out of it.

What Dukkha Actually Means

I want to take a moment with the word itself, because the translation is where much of the difficulty begins.

Dukkha is associated with the wheel, the axle, and the axle hole. It is often explained as an axle hole that does not sit true — the wheel and the axle misaligned. Scholars debate the etymology, but the image is exactly right.

So when someone asks me how life can be suffering, and says it sounds so negative — it is not really that. It is just that there is some misalignment, and the misalignment causes a wobble. It is like driving on a bad road. Or on any Bangalore road; it is the same. The wobble creates an unpleasant experience.

And a wobble can be a pothole, or it can throw you off the road entirely. Kisā Gotamī's grief, which we will come to, was a wobble too. Calling it a wobble does not make it small. It makes it understandable — and workable.

Three Kinds of Wobble

These unpleasant experiences arise in different ways. It helps to see them separately, because each asks something different of you. This is my way of dividing them; beneath each is the nearest of the tradition's own three categories, which overlap with these but are not identical.

Kisā Gotamī

Most people know the mustard seed story. A woman comes to the Buddha carrying the body of her child, unable to accept that the child has died. He sends her from house to house to find a mustard seed from a home where no one has died. She walks the whole day, finds death in every house, and comes back to her senses.

But that is not the real story. The real story is what happened before.

Kisā means thin, frail — almost like being called the beaten-down one. It was a pet name, the way we have always given each other pet names in India. Wherever she went, she was not treated well. She was rejected again and again for marriage. She always felt disrespected.

Finally, one man marries her, and she has a child. And when the child comes, the entire environment around her changes. People who never spoke to her begin to speak to her. They give her respect. They include her. For the first time, she feels she is doing something worthwhile, because she is getting something back.

So when the child dies, that is what she holds on to. There were years before that of feeling desolate, isolated. The child brought something. And with the child gone came the fear of going back to that place — so she clung, hoping that at least the change could be permanent.

We like to think the people around us will always be there. If that were so, all our grandparents would still be here. There was a day they passed, and there will be a day when we pass as well.

Every Breath

There is a beautiful exchange between the Buddha and his disciples. He asks them how often they reflect that they may die.

One says: every morning, that is the first thing I do. When I wake up, I meditate, and I think, I may pass away today. Another says: with every breath I take, I feel that this exhale may be my last.

And the Buddha says that is exactly how you need to live your life. Not only how to meditate — how to live. Because you don't know which breath is your last. Sit with a dying person and you will see it: they are thinking there is probably one more breath. Unless you are a very deep meditator, no one knows which one it is.

This kind of dukkha — a change of circumstance without warning — can happen to anyone, at any time. It does not need to happen to someone you know. Just because it has not reached your circle does not mean it is not happening all around.

The Buddha did not minimise it. He said there is physical pain and there is mental pain, and the solution to both is the same. Even with physical pain, you need to find ways to live with it — interpretations and perspectives that make it easier to live with.

However much we try, we keep building a sense of permanence. We make schedules. We invest for the next fifty years. We do a great deal of work for a day we may never see, and very little of the work we can do for the day we are actually in.

So the question is not "is life suffering?" The question is: what is the best way to handle these wobbles? What bent of mind will help you stay calm — and stay useful to the people around you? First, stay calm. If you are calm, you can help others too.

It Is Not Having — It Is Taṇhā

This is why I say the practice must be intelligent. Sitting for an hour is not enough. You can sit all your life and still feel irritated at small things — and the irritation may even get worse. The work is to understand why the irritation is happening. What are you holding on to?

There is not a single teaching where the Buddha tells a householder they should not have money, or anything else. It is not about what you possess or what you do. It is about how you hold on to it. It is taṇhā — the thirst, the craving for more — that causes the wobble. We hold things with the attitude that they should not change, and that they should always be beneficial to us.

When your child is small, you think: this person will take care of me. As they grow up and start moving out, doing their own things, you become angry at the same person. They may be doing many things you agree with, but you find the one or two you cannot, and make that the point of your ill will. Or the reverse: I like you because you do this, and if you stop, I dislike you. This creates violence — an environment where people start arranging their lives to avoid that interaction.

So look at how you are holding the things around you. Is it: this moment is beautiful, and if it passes, it passes? Or is it: this is my identity?

If you are honest and analytical, you will see that twenty years ago something else was your identity. Ten years ago, something else. At fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, fifty-five — you kept changing. And every time you changed, you expected everyone else to comply.

And if you are not holding on in that way, then in the very same moment you can experience sukha — the absence of the wobble, the smooth turning of the wheel.

The teaching is not: something is going wrong, don't be attached, don't look at this, don't look at that. It is: look at how you are interpreting your life. Look at how you are forming your attachments, and what they are made of. See where you can relax the grip — the tension in that relationship.

When you allow that, please understand: it does not set the other person free. It sets you free. It makes you available to enjoy what is actually in your life. This is a selfish practice — I keep saying this. And the Buddha kept saying that unless you can stand on your own, you cannot help another person stand.

The Leper and the Coals

The Buddha gives an analogy for taṇhā. It is a crass analogy, but it works.

A person with leprosy has so much itching and burning on the body that he sits by a pit of burning coals and holds his limbs over them — anything for a little relief. It can happen to you too: with a cut, you sometimes apply something that burns even more, and somehow it feels better.

That, he says, is what taṇhā is. When you are getting attached, you are the person with leprosy, and the coals are what you are getting attached to.

Now imagine the same person, healed, walking around normally. When he looks back at the coal pit, he has no wish to go near it. The same person who went there for relief, day after day, now knows: I am well. It will burn.

This is not a judgement. You don't go to a doctor for no reason — you may go to a coffee shop like that, but not a doctor. It is when you are unwell that you go. And it is when you are unwell that you create dukkha around you, and for yourself, by attaching, by not letting yourself see where it comes from, rubbing yourself with fire and wondering why it isn't helping.

While you are sick, it is very hard to leave the coals. You step away, the itching starts, and you go back. Somehow you have to find a medicine that lets you stand away for a few minutes. Then you start getting better, and you visit a little less. And less. And one day you are completely well, and you see someone else at the pit and understand: that person is sick.

There is no concept of sin in this teaching. The Buddha only says: this is skilful, or this is unskilful. Skilful is what helps you. Unskilful is what harms you. That's it. In his time he stood apart from both the Brahmins and the Jains, both of whom, in their own ways, framed action in terms of merit and sin. He stood in between and said: there is no sin to be punished — you act, and you face the consequences. That does not make it all relative. Skilful and unskilful are known by what an action carries — greed, hatred and delusion, or their absence — and by what it does to you. A leper will be at the coals, because that is where his relief is. There is nothing wrong with it. It only shows where he is.

Even the rules of the Sangha came this way. There were none at the start; he made them as he saw how people behaved, so that no one would hurt another or be seen as higher than another. He said that when he was gone, the rules would not even matter — what mattered was the meditation. It is like our 5:55 a.m. door closing. It is not a rule. It is there so the class can begin together.

Peeling the Layers

When you begin to see life as a wobble — circumstances changing around you, you yourself changing — you start to understand the mechanics of attachment. And once you see the mechanics, you can look at them from outside, instead of only as "me."

Sometimes I hear: I did so many things I didn't want to do, but you forced me. But look closely: there is always some action you will not take, whoever is pushing you — some people will never strike another person, whatever happens. That means there is always some space in how you respond. "The environment made me behave like this" leaves that space unexamined. The environment does not need to dictate your behaviour.

Start small. Meditate. Understand your reactions. Understand the difference between what the environment is and what you are, how that interaction happens, and where the pain is being caused. Peel away even one layer, and you begin to see: much of it is my own world.

It has happened to me many times. The more I think about something, the more grief I cause in that situation. The more I say, whatever happens, happens, and I will simply do the best I can — the easier it is. Often, if you just stop reacting to the person, it goes away on its own.

We give ourselves too much importance. I will change everyone. Because of me, everyone is happy. We don't see that it is just a wobble. You don't need books or teachings for this. Sitting and looking at how you are interacting with the world will give you the hints.

Bringing It to the Cushion

Whatever I say here, you can find online. What matters is the connection to the meditation.

When you sit, observe the state of the mind. Where are you today — not today, this moment? The Buddha gives the simile of a cowherd.

I relate to this through walking my dogs. On a quiet road, I let them off the leash. On a busy road, I keep them close, pull them in, keep them out of the traffic. Work with the mind according to where it is.

Over time, the cows learn. They stop wandering toward the fields and settle where it is comfortable — and the cowherd can be comfortable too. He just knows his ten cows are grazing, and that after a while he will take them home. This is what training produces: the collected mind.

Concentration, through the breath, is always the building block. Insight — seeing how we attach, how we build relationships and try to change them — does not happen until you are calm. So when the sitting is peaceful, enjoy it. Those are the times you can look and say: oh, this is what I did the other day.

A Final Word

We began with the axle. The opposite of dukkha is sukha, explained the same way: an axle hole that sits true, a wheel that turns smoothly. That is what the practice is. Not a different road, not a life without potholes — the axle slowly coming back into alignment, so the same road is travelled with less wobble.