I for one am of the "life is dhukkha" school, rather than the "life contains dhukkha". While it is true that there are both pleasant and unpleasant experiences in life, the Buddha taught that either choice was unsatisfactory, full of stress, full of suffering, both in the moment and in the end. I think it's part of what he meant when he said his teaching was against the stream. Somehow I don't think it's enough to get the best life we can get. We have to go beyond that and see how it's all a game you can't win. It's all dhukkha.

Just came across this chapter from Edward Conze's Buddhism: It's Essence and Development, and I thought it'd make some good contemplation to share.

Conze lists four ways in which what we perceive as pleasant or benefitial is still stress and disatisfaction at its core:

1) Something, while pleasant, involves the suffering of others. It's easy to say that we're all connected, but to really experience it ... In some sense, since we all experience each other's suffering in one way or another, no one gets liberated until everybody gets liberated. Conze gives a great little story about how people with comfort get all disturbed by people without, because they don't want to recognize that their riches are the other's poverty.

2) Something, while pleasant, is tied up with anxiety, since one is afraid to lose it. Classic! How bloody often do we get what we want, only to find ourselves chained to a whole load of work to maintain it? How many of us think "relationships are work"? There is also my favourite variation on this theme, wherein I can hardly enjoy whatever pleasure I have attained, because I'm simultaneously scheming how I am going to get more of it!

3) Something, while pleasant, binds us still further to conditions which are the ground on which a great deal of suffering is inevitable. I hope this one is self-explainatory, because any examples I could give would be dreadful to my self-respect.

4) The pleasures derived from anything included in the skhandhas are worthless to satisfy the inmost longings of our hearts. Anyone ever heard of "all-pervasive suffering"? It's the third type of suffering the Buddha spoke about, and some say it's really only understandable by yogis and stuff, but I say we all got a good taste for this one. It's the constant niggeling feeling that something, or rather everything, is not right. The quiet, insidious angst that every being everywhere experiences because we know, somehow, that this little play we are seeing in front of us is not real at all. Some would say that it is this all-pervasive suffering that leads to all our pain. All this activity of our lives is just a way to make lots of noise so we don't have to hear that inner voice whispering "bullshit" in our ear with every heart-beat.

"The joy of pleasures of this world,/ And the great joy of heaven,/ Compared with the joy of the destruction of craving/ Are not worth a sixteenth part.// Sorry are they whose burden is heavy,/ And happy are they who have cast it down;/ When once they have cast off this burden,/ They will seek to be burdened no more."

Tibetan Vinaya (monastic rules), cited by Edward Conze.