Always suffering

Buddhism teaches Dukkha, translated as suffering, pain or unsatisfactoriness as the first of the Four Noble Truths. Buddha is quoted as saying his teaching was 'suffering and it's cessation'.

In the Tibetan tradition the suffering of samsara is generally classified into three categories; the suffering of suffering, the suffering of change and the suffering of all conditioned existence. The suffering of suffering includes physical and mental pain in the form of sickness, ageing and death. The intensity of this type of suffering varies according to individual experience, but is said to be greater in the lower samsaric realms. The suffering of change is being separated from what you find pleasant and encountering that which you find unpleasant. This is a form of suffering experienced even by beings in higher realms, and one which human beings experience constantly in various forms. The third form of suffering is very subtle and known as all-pervasive suffering. It can be described as having everything, yet not being content.

According to Gampopa only the spiritually mature with some degree of realisation can really understand this experientially. He likens the difference in how this suffering is experienced by an ordinary person and a spiritually mature person to the difference between feeling a hair in the palm of the hand compared to feeling it in the eye.

Understanding suffering is essential to the development of compassion and Bodhicitta, however simply doing so on an intellectual and abstract level is not sufficient, we have to actually realise it through personal experience. And there were lots of reminders of samsara today, a child dying of cancer, a woman in despair over her boyfriend being depressed, lonely old people in my street afraid to go out and then there are the global crises.

Once we become aware of suffering on a deeper level, we can develop renunciation and compassion.