Are Pain and Pleasure Equivalent In Terms of Suffering? – Dialectic Two-Step

Question: Are Pain and Pleasure Equivalent In Terms of Suffering?

This spring I went to a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat, and I’m trying to make sense of that experience. That we suffer when we feel pain is obvious. Yet, something that the teacher tended to hint to often is that there is a very subtle form of suffering that’s generated with pleasure, due to the fact that we cling to it.

Response:

We always need to be precise when we talk about suffering, or dukka.  The Buddha described three types of suffering.  Being clear about what type you’re talking about is important.  The first type is inevitable; the suffering that comes from birth, illness, old age, and death.  There is relatively little we can do about the pain that comes with these events in our lives.  Medicine offers some comfort, but it’s not complete.

When we talk about “equivalence” of pain and pleasure, it should be explicit that this is strictly in the realm of the remaining two types of suffering.

The suffering that comes with our response to change
The suffering that comes from conditioning.

The former is created by mind, in that disappointment arises when something we want to remain the same changes – e.g. a relationship fails, an object breaks, and so on. The latter is also created by the mind.    Suffering with respect to conditioning is the dissatisfaction that arises when things don’t work out as we expect – we lose a job, someone doesn’t agree with us, and so on.

If we look at these two types of dukka through the lens of pleasure and pain, it goes like this:

Suffering because of change

You have a favorite tea mug (pleasure), it breaks (pain). You are sad because of the change.


Suffering because of conditioning change

There is a person you strongly dislike. They show up at a party you are at (pain). You leave to get away from them (pleasure?). You end up missing the party (pain)

In these examples our minds create the suffering. The objects of our preferences or aversions do not directly cause the pain or pleasure; it is our response to them that generates dukka. I believe this is what the teacher meant.  Mind is the source of the pain and pleasure, in this way they might be considered equivalent.

 

Dialectic Two-Step  is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

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