Seneca, Letters from a StoicThere are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Speaking with my son on the way back home on the train, I had occasion to share the quote above. I had often seen it quoted but had never felt the need to ponder it more deeply or share it. At that moment, however, it seemed particularly apt.
Aside from the forms of dukkha explicitly mentioned in the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta, there are also three more derivative categories of suffering:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%E1%B8%A5kha#:~:text=Birth%20is%20du%E1%B8%A5kha%2C%20aging%20is,what%20is%20wanted%20is%20du%E1%B8%A5kha.
- Dukkha-dukkha, aversion to physical suffering – this includes the physical and mental sufferings of birth, aging, illness, dying; distress due to what is not desirable.
- Viparinama-dukkha, the frustration of disappearing happiness – this is the duḥkha of pleasant or happy experiences changing to unpleasant when the causes and conditions that produced the pleasant experiences cease.
- Sankhara-dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of changing and impermanent “things” – the incapability of conditioned things to give us lasting happiness. This includes “a basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all existence, all forms of life, because all forms of life are changing, impermanent and without any inner core or substance.”[28] On this level, the term indicates a lack of lasting satisfaction, or a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.
I suppose that anxiety and worry are viparinama-dukkha although I never really took the time to clarify that for myself.
Strange, now that I think about it not to have done so. I suppose I really only ever thought of restless and remorse as a part of the five hindrances and didn’t get too concerned with the their nature as dukkha.
I think there is a lot more to flesh out here but it is obvious that, for Seneca at least, there is no further escape from suffering. No Nibbana for the Stoic Sage unfortunately.
As a post script, I thought I would include this Sutta which I came across during this morning’s Dhamma study. Very unexpected but incredibly apropos: https://suttacentral.net/sn22.7/en/sujato
Cattāri Brahmavihārā 