The Buddha Did Not Teach an End to Suffering

How the mistranslation of “dukkha” has mislead Western Buddhists

It has become normative and conventional to translate the Buddhist term “dukkha” as “suffering.” This is a bad translation. “Suffering” is not what the Buddha meant by “dukkha.”

Translating terms about concepts is always tricky because often the closest words in the target language don’t mean quite the same thing. That’s part of the problem with “dukkha.” But there’s an even bigger problem. The term subtly shifted in meaning over the thousands of years since the Buddha spoke about dukkha. Even though the word has been in continuous usage, it now no longer means what it did when the Buddha said it.

So, how do we know what Buddha and the Early Buddhists meant by “dukkha”? We have three ways.

One is the presence of ancient translations. We are fortunate enough to have an extremely early translation of “dukkha” into an ancient language we know with great precision: ancient Greek. The ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho accompanied Alexander the Great on his conquest of India. Pyrrho spent about a year and a half studying in Taxila — a major center of Indian Buddhist and philosophical thought. Pyrrho translated the Buddhist Three Marks of Existence into Greek and used it as a cornerstone for the philosophical movement he started upon his return to Greece: Pyrrhonism.

Pyrrho translated “dukkha” as astathmēta, which means “unstable.”

In addition to this evidence, we also have evidence from etymology. This evidence also points to “dukkha” as meaning “unsteady” or “standing badly.” As the Silk Road philologist, Christopher Beckwith explained:

…although the sense of duḥkha in Normative Buddhism is traditionally given as ‘suffering’, that and similar interpretations are highly unlikely for Early Buddhism. Significantly, Monier-Williams himself doubts the usual explanation of duḥkha and presents an alternative one immediately after it, namely: duḥ-stha “‘standing badly,’ unsteady, disquieted (lit. and fig.); uneasy”, and so on. This form is also attested, and makes much better sense as the opposite of the Rig Veda sense of sukha, which Monier-Williams gives in full as “(said to be fr. 5. su + 3. kha , and to mean originally ‘having a good…