Modern Buddhism: The Proof is in the Suffering
Dukkha is probably the most debatable translation in all of the Buddhist canon, no doubt because of the logical suggestion that the traditional translation sounds, uh, maybe a little bit pessimistic, when the word in question means ‘suffering’. Because, from a western standpoint, that doesn’t sound too inspirational, which is largely how Western religions are oriented: e.g. hope, redemption, mercy, forgiveness, eternity, virgin birth and eternal life. All of which is well and good, if perhaps a bit unrealistic, but it was largely identified with the Christ child and a perennially young Jesus.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iranian plateau, Buddhists are and were defining a religion based on dukkha, suffering, that doesn’t necessarily inspire you to be all that you can be, but clearly tells you what to avoid: ignorance, greed, hatred, anger, and especially lust, craving, and possession(s). It’s like positive space and negative space. In Christianity, especially since the Protestant era, the individual is something created from clay into one of thousands of creative creatures, while in Buddhism the individual is carved from a block of wood that is forever subject to rot, decay, and decomposition.
So, which one is better? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and, for many people, beauty for a philosophy depends on beautiful words to inspire and bless. So, when Buddhism went West, those new monks immediately set out to remake the vocab. So, sati awareness became ‘mindfulness’, metta friendship became ‘lovingkindness’, and dukkha suffering became ‘unsatisfactoriness’, ‘stress’, everything but ‘bummer’. Now, these weren’t bloggers or vloggers, mind you, but senior monks often trained by Ajahn Chah, no less, in the mainstream Theravada school.
And how did that go over in Asia? Pretty good, it seems, to the point that most Asians seem to not notice the difference, assuming that ‘lovingkindness’ was first and foremost a translation for metta in Pali, when its deliberate conversion from the Hebrew chesed to the English language for Christian use some 500 years ago is well documented. If the term had been in popular Buddhist use in 1984, wouldn’t the Dalai Lama have said, “My religion is lovingkindness”? Yes. Of course. But this is good, because it means that two major religions are moving closer together, Islam notwithstanding. And does the practice shift with the language? It would seem, since ‘hugging meditation’ is now popular, something unthinkable just yesterday…
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