No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners: Clear Answers to Burning Questions About Core Buddhist Teachings

by Noah Rasheta

Experiencing suffering isn’t the real problem, however. The problem arises in how we react to that suffering. The Buddha taught that “when touched with a feeling of pain, the ordinary uninstructed person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows” (Saṃyutta Nikāya 36.6). Reactivity becomes a vicious cycle. The more we dwell on our sense of suffering, the more we reinforce the very cause of it: wanting life to be other than it is. The more intense the suffering, the more we want to be rid of it.