Introduction

I’ve often heard it acknowledged by more reflective or informed Buddhists that ‘suffering’ is not a good translation for the term dukkha, the concept that is supposed to identify what the problem in human experience is that Buddhist practice seeks to address. Yet the term ‘suffering’ also seems to have such a tenacious cultural hold in Western Buddhism that the same person who acknowledges this may still circle back to talking about ‘suffering’ half an hour later. This seems to me to be a serious source of confusion, not for scholarly reasons about the translation of the Pali term, but for practical ones of having a clear enough understanding of what practice is engaged with. One of the valuable things I find about the culture of ‘secular Buddhism’ is that it is a place where critical questions can be asked about such features of the Buddhist tradition and alternatives proposed, without being immediately blocked or sunk in a sea of appeals to traditional authority. So here I would like to explain why I think Buddhists would be much better off ceasing to talk about ‘suffering’ altogether, and instead using a much clearer term to identify what practice aims to address – absolutization.

I don’t want to get into a scholarly discussion of the origins of the term dukkha here, but it’s enough to say that it’s associated with a general ill-fittingness (du- being a prefix meaning ‘bad’). There are thus an array of possible translations – frustration, unsatisfactoriness, or maladaptation perhaps being the prime examples that are all probably better than ‘suffering’ (although they all need some qualification and context in their turn). The problem with ‘suffering’ is that it is a normal feature of all human experience, whether we’re talking about bodily pain, mental anguish, frustration at the denial or loss of expected pleasure, or a lack of a sense of meaning and purpose in personal life. Much of this suffering is inevitable. We live in a world of earthquakes, volcanoes, cancer and covid viruses, and the extent we can do anything about this is at best marginal – we can build our house more soundly or develop better covid vaccines, but we can’t remove these sources of suffering as such. Even where sources of suffering are due to past human activity, as in the case of climate change, there is, alas, a limited impact we can have on changing the situation. We also most likely live in a world where dropped ice creams and even feelings of meaninglessness are likely to happen, even if we reduce their frequency. Mindfulness may make it less likely that you will drop your ice cream, but not entirely rule out that possibility. Practice in general may make your life far more meaningful and integrated – but it won’t make it perfectly so, nor rule out the possibility of even major errors of judgement resulting in conflicts with others, as the sex scandals surrounding supposedly advanced practitioners keep reminding us.

The Buddha’s insights are clearly not about removing ‘suffering’ at all: only, at best, about allaying it by helping us work with our responses to it. This is made clear in the Buddha’s metaphor of the second arrow (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6): if we imagine suffering as the first arrow, we make it worse for ourselves through our response of craving, hatred and delusion – which is like a second arrow. So, it is as though we make the injury twice as bad, after an attack, by firing a second arrow at ourselves. This is, of course, also the insight in mindfulness-based stress reduction, or any of a range of other mindfulness-based therapeutic interventions. We can’t do anything about suffering, but we can avoid making it worse for ourselves. This approach is widely used and appreciated in Western Buddhism, and yet people continue to talk about ‘suffering’ as the problem – why?

Inconsistencies in Buddhist views of suffering and desire

I’d suggest that one reason is a lack of clarity and consistency in the way the Buddhist tradition presents itself, due to the conflicts between practice and traditional authority. If you tell a story of the Buddha’s life in which Gautama sets out to conquer ‘suffering’, for instance, but then he actually fails to do that but rather finds better ways of adapting to it, we are obliged to try to reconcile the contradictions in the ways we have framed the story. We do this, perhaps, by creative ambiguity, implicitly pretending that the Buddha’s insight is still actually a solution to suffering itself, when it is nothing of the kind. This may allow some exaggeration of the significance of the Buddha’s insights by making them completely incomparable with those found in other contexts, giving them a supposed cosmic rather than just a practical importance.

That inconsistency can be found when one looks more closely at what the ‘second arrow’ means in practice. The driver of that ‘second arrow’ is tanha, which I will translate here as craving. Craving can also become frustrated and thus create hatred and lead us to construct a whole projected set of views in accordance with itself, creating delusion. Thus, although we have the three animals in the centre of the Wheel of Samsara representing craving, hatred and delusion, it is craving that is seen as the primary driver of the wheel. When the first arrow hits us and we respond with craving for the pain to go away, hatred for the person that fired it, and delusions about what an all-round bastard that person who fired it was, we make everything worse for ourselves, because we set up a pattern of proliferation (or reinforcing feedback loops, or cyclical conditionality). We keep going through that pain again and again through our wish to make it go away, with every cycle increasing the pressure for its continuance.

So, we can get a pretty clear understanding in practice of what craving is, and how it makes things worse for us, though experience of meditation and of the kinds of cyclical loops we get caught up in, in response to suffering. However, traditional Buddhism still then has to reconcile that practical understanding with an ideological commitment to the belief that the Buddha has somehow solved ‘suffering’, by gaining a perfect state of ‘enlightenment’. The belief in karma and rebirth also requires that responsibility for that suffering be attributed to our own past judgements, if not in this life than in a previous one. There seem to be two ways that traditional Buddhism attempts that reconciliation – either by identifying craving with human desire as a whole, or in making an ad hoc distinction between two kinds of desire.

If you believe that all desire is craving, then our whole lives, our basic desire to lead them, and even the most trivial everyday motives, are taken to be intrinsically effects of reinforcing feedback loops or cyclical conditionality. This is obviously absolutist nonsense when judged practically. When you desire a drink of water in response to your body’s need for hydration, or you desire to walk across the room to pick up a book about Buddhism, you are not a priori caught up in a closed feedback loop. You are not craving anything, and do not need to be rescued from it by ‘enlightenment’. Instead, you are just subject to ordinary embodied human desire – along with the ordinary embodied human suffering that comes with it. Buddhist practice can do nothing about this, and we need to decisively let go of the fantasy that it can.

The alternative, more sophisticated, traditional approach, then, is to distinguish between two different types of desire: unenlightened craving and ordinary harmless desire that is compatible with enlightenment. This is the approach I’ve heard many Western Buddhist teachers offer, and it’s articulated clearly in the writings of P.A. Payutto, a Thai monk and scholar. However, if you understand this distinction between two types of desire only teleologically – that is, in terms of the enlightenment it either allows or prevents – this is not a distinction of any practical use to us. None of us know any certified enlightened people or are enlightened ourselves, so we can have only the vaguest idea of what leads to enlightenment or does not. It’s a bit like stepping outside my front door in Wales and asking whether I should turn left or right to get to Australia: the directional distinction makes no practical sense without more information about the intermediate route. In practice, then, we use our experience from practice to help us judge this, and then identify that experience with the Buddhist formulae. The involvement of enlightenment as a goal can only provide an ad hoc rationalization – one we make up and enculturate to make it sound a bit more justified.

A different approach based on the problem of absolutization

So, a different approach is required. We need to identify in practice what the problem is, with as much clarity as possible, if we are to use it as a starting point. That means that we do not need to be confined to Buddhist formulae, or even to express ourselves in their terms, if they prove unhelpful, but nevertheless can develop the insights we find in Buddhist practice. There is actually now a huge amount of other evidence about what creates the second arrow effect and how it makes everything worse for us, coming not directly from Buddhist tradition, but from systems thinking, embodied meaning theory, the neuroscience of brain lateralization, the pragmatic approaches to philosophy that challenge metaphysical belief, and the psychology and psychoanalysis of conflict, repression, projection and manipulation.

It is using these kinds of resources to supplement the initial understanding I gained from Buddhism that has helped me to develop my own alternative account, based on more than 20 years of work overall on Middle Way Philosophy, of what the problem is. The key term for the process I have identified in this multi-disciplinary way is absolutization, a brief definition of which is the assumption that we have the whole story. I think that if we start to use absolutization rather than ‘suffering’ as the basis of our understanding of what the problem is, we can integrate our understanding of what Buddhism traditionally presents as the First and Second Noble Truths. We do not need to appeal forward to a state of enlightenment to make sense of it, nor do we have to present ordinary human life and its desires as intrinsically bad. Instead, we can build on our experience of states of craving, hatred, delusion, and proliferation to illuminate it from other sources available to us.

My new book, Absolutization, goes into this by exploring 23 dimensions of absolutization. Within the scope of this short article, I can obviously only give you a brief idea of these. However, the key idea I want to convey is that by synthesising different sources we can arrive at increasingly helpful practical explanations of the insights we may have got from Buddhism – rather than getting bogged down merely in Buddhist interpretative scholarship and debates that are merely internal to that tradition, or for that matter merely reproducing the approach taken in only one non-Buddhist tradition. Whatever the limitations of the particular synthesis I’ve arrived at, it’s the synthetic approach itself that I would like to encourage more than anything.

Key perspectives on absolutization

In the book, I start off by talking about proliferation (papanca) as presented in early Buddhism, about the ways that craving, hatred and delusion are interdependent, and about the ways this links to dualism or false dichotomy – constantly limiting our option unnecessarily to two opposed alternatives. Absolutization arises in every judgement in which we limit our range of awareness in this way, thus confining ourselves to a new repeat cycle of assumptions and closed emotional states.

We can readily understand this cycle of assumptions by drawing on systems theory, which distinguishes between reinforcing feedback loops (also called closed or ‘positive’ feedback loops) and balancing (or open, or ‘negative’) ones. Our minds are systems that can either allow new information to modify their state or allow themselves to be modified by that new information. Systems are interdependent, but when caught up in reinforcing loops of proliferation, we habitually assume that our mind is independent of the surrounding systems. The more we continue in reinforcing loops of assumption, the more fragile our beliefs become, as they are then increasingly vulnerable to being rapidly destroyed by the conditions they have been ignoring. In recent days I have seen the UK government do this in recent days, to be forced into a series of humiliating U-turns. A more personal example is that of dramatic religious conversion, where we can no longer hold back the conditions we have been denying and have to dramatically change our whole world-view. This fragility is also typical of all ruminating or proliferating states, and shows their maladaptation to the conditions.

Embodied meaning theory, and the neuroscientific understanding of brain lateralization found in the remarkable work of Iain McGilchrist, also helps to alert us to the ways that thinking we have the whole story is associated with attempted disembodiment. In a whole host of ways (not just the philosophy of the whipping boy ‘Cartesian Dualism’) we assume that our judgements are independent of our bodies and the wider context of those bodies when we are caught up in craving, hatred and delusion. The most neglected of these is that the meaning of the language we use is dependent on our bodily experience, rather than representing an exterior reality. The lateralization of our brains makes this attempted disembodiment possible because the left hemisphere can readily assume itself to be separate in this way. It’s no surprise then, that a key component of mindfulness as a response simply involves embodied awareness to counteract that disembodiment.

Perhaps the most entrenched implications of absolutization, however, are philosophical, in the sense of widespread enculturated assumptions that have been formulated and defended in Western philosophy. Foremost amongst these is the belief in metaphysical claims, which are independent absolute claims trying to reach beyond human experience. These claims are linked together by absolutized logic, and defended by the belief that metaphysics is inevitable, as well as by the use of claims with infinite scope to cleverly avoid any possible scrutiny from experience. Take, for instance, the theological defences of the existence of God against the problem of evil, all of which involve passing the buck of responsibility for evil to an infinite God who knows why evil occurs, or what its ultimate benefit is, or what the larger picture is in which it will actually be good. This kind of defence is quite widely typical of the ways we defend absolute beliefs, and thus stop ourselves learning and adapting.

Psychology also provides some key tools for understanding absolutization. The relationship between believing you have the whole story and psychological repression is an insight of psychoanalysis, and we can readily see this playing out in the conflicts created by religious and political groups with absolute beliefs. These conflicts need to be seen both internally as psychological ones, and externally as socio-political ones, as the two interact constantly. Again, though, we’ll need to distinguish between unavoidable conflict (e.g., between lions and zebra) and the avoidable conflict produced by absolutization, when we fail to learn about the ‘enemy’ due to our defensive looped states. Projection and substitution are two further mechanisms for absolutization: we assume that our beliefs are true in the world (project them) and substitute easier mechanisms for harder ones. It is this substitution that results in the unexamined belief in (or over-reaction to) biases that could have been avoided if we had seen things more broadly. They also result in the use of absolutized beliefs as an easy way of exerting power over others, as if everyone is in the same superficial abstract loops of belief, they are much easier to control than if they are drawing their own conclusions from experience. The effectiveness of propaganda, then, too, also depends on absolutization.

So, I believe that there is an alternative account available to the identification of ‘suffering’ as the problem addressed by Buddhism. That account is more comprehensive, more flexible, and no longer subject to traditional Buddhist metaphysical beliefs of the kind that have continually undermined its practice. Of course, to see this alternative account more fully we need to put it into the context of a positive practice that focuses on avoiding absolutization (the Middle Way) rather than ‘achieving enlightenment’, thus making much better sense of the value we may find experientially in Buddhist practice. For instance, we could also see how avoiding absolutization (and cultivating increasing integration of judgement) forms a better practical alternative for moral action than merely the attempt to reduce suffering for ourselves and others. An account of this practice is the focus of my next book in the series, ‘The Five Principles of Middle Way Philosophy’, due out in Feb 2023 – but that is another article or another discussion.

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Absolutization: The Source of Dogma, Repression and Conflict (Middle Way Philosophy Volume I) is now published by Equinox and is available on their website at a 25% discount if you input the code ‘RELIGION’ on checking out.