The Buddha said that all of his teachings, traditionally numbered as 84,000, could be reduced to just two: dukkha and the end of dukkha. Suffering, in its sense of physical or mental distress, is only the coarsest expression of dukkha. The relationship between the English word “suffering” and the Pali concept of dukkha is comparable to that between bright red and color. Dukkha could also be translated as a chronic sense of lack, or a flaw or incompleteness of experience. In this sense, dukkha is experience seen as “not-Nibbana”. For this reason, the most subtle and sublime mental states are […]