Understanding Dukkha¹

It sticks on the skin and goes into the flesh; from the flesh it gets into the bones. It's like an insect on a tree that eats through the bark, into the wood and then into the core, until finally the tree dies.

We've grown up like that. It gets buried deep inside. Our parents taught us grasping and attachment, giving meaning to things, believing firmly that we exist as a self-entity and that things belong to us. From our birth that's what we are taught. We hear this over and over again, and it penetrates our hearts and stays there as our habitual feeling. We're taught to get things, to accumulate and hold on to them, to see them as important and as ours. This is what our parents know, and this is what they teach us. So it gets into our minds, into our bones.

When we take an interest in meditation and hear the teaching of a spiritual guide it's not easy to understand. It doesn't really grab us. We're taught not to see and to do things the old way, but when we hear the teaching, it doesn't penetrate the mind; we only hear it with our ears. People just don't know themselves.

So we sit and listen to teachings, but it's just sound entering the ears. It doesn't get inside and affect us. It's like we're boxing and we keep hitting the other guy but he doesn't go down. We remain stuck in our self-conceit. The wise have said that moving a mountain from one place to another is easier than moving the self-conceit of people.

We can use explosives to level a mountain and then move the earth. But the tight grasping of our self-conceit - oh man! The wise can teach us to our dying day, but they can't get rid of it. It remains hard and fast. Our wrong ideas and bad tendencies remain so solid and unbudging, and we're not even aware of it. So the wise have said that removing this self-conceit and turning wrong understanding into right understanding is about the hardest thing to do.

For us puthujjana (worldly beings) to progress on to being kalyānajana (virtuous beings) is so hard. Puthujjana means people who are thickly obscured, who are dark, who are stuck deep in this darkness and obscuration. The kalyānajana has made things lighter. We teach people to lighten, but they don't want to do that because they don't understand their situation, their condition of obscuration. So they keep on wandering in their confused state.

If we come across a pile of buffalo dung we won't think it's ours and we won't want to pick it up. We will just leave it where it is because we know what it is.

Footnotes

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A large section of this Dhamma talk has previously been published under the title 'Giving Up Good and Evil'