Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Lindsay Lohan's Lesbian Breakup

Learning the meaning of dukkha

Her "humiliating" breakup
Lindsay Lohan responds to all the rumors surrounding her split with lesbian girlfriend Samantha Ronson. (Does laughing at spoiled celebrities count as schadenfreude?)

The Pali/Sanskrit word dukkha is difficult to comprehend. It is a multivalent term, which is to say it has many shades of meaning. It is the flip side of sukha (happiness, gladness). Commonly defined as "suffering," unsatisfactoriness, ill, woe, pain, unpleasantness, sadness, stress, and so on, it is all these things and more.

But the Buddha was very specific when he defined it as a widely compassed Buddhist term: What now is dukkha?


Wisdom Quarterly's celebrity coverage

"Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering, not to receive what one desires is suffering — in brief the Five Aggregates subject to grasping are suffering" (SN 56.11, translation by Ven. Piyadassi, Access to Insight).

“Now this, monks, is the Noble Truth about dukkha. Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha, likewise sorrow and grief, woe, lamentation [crying] and despair. To be conjoined with things we dislike, to be separated from things which we like — that also is dukkha. Not to get what one wants, that also is dukkha. In a word, this body, this fivefold mass which is based on grasping [Five Aggregates: forming, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness], that is dukkha(SN 5, translation by Dr. Elizabeth Ashby).

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