Once you invoke metrics, motivation changes from intrinsic to extrinsic. Also, narrowing down to task focus probably suppresses default mode network activity. The finite can nullify the infinite!
I hear this argument about dukkha's meaning a lot and to me it isn't quite adequate. The instability you mention is explicitly baked into the first characteristic: anicca. The second characteristic is a very non-secular value judgment that what is temporal, unstable, etc. is unsatisfactory, unworthy of pursuit. The Buddha called it the ignoble quest—the noble quest being the search for that which does *not* age, decay and die.
Of course, there's a psychological layer to that too: we do tend to be dissatisfied with transiency and instability! But your paragraph on how Phyrro's aim was much more secular is really interesting and to me sheds light on this. Given his secular aim, Phyrro emphasised 'astathmeta', which sounds much more like anicca to me than dukkha. How do we know or infer that astathmeta was meant to translate the latter? I'd be interested in that.
Yes, the instability is also part of anicca. Buddha, however, was using words that existed in his language rather than coining specialized terms. In that respect, there shouldn't be any problem that there's an overlap in meaning between anicca and dukkha. The overlap reinforces the point.
The translations come from the Silk Road philologist Christopher Beckwith, in his book "Greek Buddha." It's in the first chapter, which Princeton U. Press has made free online. https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10500.pdf
Here's what Beckwith says:
"The most important point here is that duḥ + stha literally means ‘dis-/ bad- + stand-’, that is, ‘badly standing, unsteady’ and is therefore virtually identical to the literal meaning of Greek astathmēta, from a- + sta- ‘not- + stand’,38 both evidently meaning ‘unstable’. This strongly suggests that Pyrrho’s middle term is in origin a simple calque."
Beckwith says "anepikrita" and "anicca" share the meaning of "unfixed." While that does seem to be true, the two words end up feeling very different. This is associated with the change in the order of the words. Pyrrho's version is sort of "Aristotle is wrong. Here's why he's wrong. Therefore, do this." Buddha's version is sort of: "Heraclitus is right. Because of that, we suffer. Therefore, the Brahmins are wrong."
You can find reviews that criticize Beckwith's account here. Beckwith tries hard to make a case that this is Pyrrho's translation of the Three Marks of Existence. My attitude is that Pyrrho came to India with some philosophical problems on his mind. He's a Democritean and likely has some affinity for Democritus' student Protagoras. Aristotle and Plato have contradicted Democritus and Protagoras. Pyrrho sees ideas in Buddhism that can address these open issues in Greek philosophy. So, I see what Pyrrho did less as translation and more as repackaging and repurposing, and in that sense, somewhat changing Buddhist ideas.
It should also be taken into consideration that Pyrrho was having to learn a foreign language while he was learning Buddhism.
I suspect that Pyrrho didn't think he needed to persuade his fellow Greeks that life entails suffering. It would seem that the Greeks already believed that. Pyrrho explicitly gives his take on the Three Marks as a recipe for eudaimonia. There's no need to say in that recipe that one starts out without eudaimonia.
I think that Pyrrho would have disagreed with the Buddha about the noble quest being the search for that which does not age, decay, and die. That would have sounded a lot like Plato's forms. It looks to me like Pyrrho chose to lean into the Heraclitian and probably Democritean view that we don't have access to such things.
BTW, I disagree with Beckwith that "apathia" got corrupted into "aphasia."
As you say, the Buddha used everyday words, and I think this supports my points. Dukkha is not a specialized philosophical term, it's the everyday word for pain, just as sukha is for pleasure. The Buddha and his disciples weren't philologists, I'm not sure to what extent etymology matters here versus actual usage.
The first noble truth says that birth, aging, sickness and death are painful (dukkha is an adjective there). I'm not sure what it would mean that "birth is unstable." Words descended from dukkha—like Hindi's dukh or Thai's kwam thuk—refer to feeling pain, suffering, sadness, distress, unhappiness, to cause grief or difficulty, etc.
If dukkha conveys instability, does sukha convey stability? A main argument against sensory pleasures (kāmasukha) is that they're fleeting, that they're anicca!
To me, that "what is anicca is dukkha" is not an emphasis or a redundancy—which would be if dukkha is just trying to say that things are unstable, the literal meaning of anicca—but the inference that, because of that, they will entail literal pain sooner or later, physical or mental. This becomes the value judgement I pointed out in my first comment. "Anicca -> dukkha" is the most concise summary of the renunciant, transcendentalist mindset.
I see Jonathan C Gold has a paper on the difficulties he had with Buddhist doctrine and how everything changed after applying Phyrro's understanding to dukkha in Buddhist texts. I still have to delve into it, but my first reaction was: well, of course "anicca -> dukkha" is challenging, it's a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure how many modern Buddhists actually agree! But the tendency has been to slightly change the claim so we don't have to admit or even realise we disagree, it seems to me.
I've heard dharma teachers make dukkha mean essentially another version of impermanence: what is impermanent is suffering; but suffering doesn't only mean suffering, it has three meaning, the first of which refers to how things are always changing. So: what is impermanent is impermanent?
I'm sorry for going on for so long, it's a topic of much interest to me! Thanks, Doug; and sorry for a very late reply.
It seems to me that impermanence and instability have similarities, but they point to different things. With impermanence, the thing that is here now will not be here in the future. With instability, the thing that is here now will still be here in the future, but its position will have changed.
Beckwith's point is that in the Buddha's era, "dukkha" was not simply a word for "pain"; it was also a word for "unstable." Since then, this second meaning has fallen away. There's a paper that picks up Beckwith's idea and finds that some early texts using "dukkha" don't quite make sense when only the first meaning is applied, but they make perfect sense when the second meaning is applied.
I'll make an attempt on the meaning of "birth is unstable." In the context of weighing (measurement), "unstable" means one cannot be confident of how it will turn out. Birth fits that. We're not sure how birth, sickness, death, etc. will turn out.
I make this mistake all the time, thinking that a perfect life is within reach if I just get a final couple of ducks lined up. It looks better on paper than it actually feels.
Once you invoke metrics, motivation changes from intrinsic to extrinsic. Also, narrowing down to task focus probably suppresses default mode network activity. The finite can nullify the infinite!
I hear this argument about dukkha's meaning a lot and to me it isn't quite adequate. The instability you mention is explicitly baked into the first characteristic: anicca. The second characteristic is a very non-secular value judgment that what is temporal, unstable, etc. is unsatisfactory, unworthy of pursuit. The Buddha called it the ignoble quest—the noble quest being the search for that which does *not* age, decay and die.
Of course, there's a psychological layer to that too: we do tend to be dissatisfied with transiency and instability! But your paragraph on how Phyrro's aim was much more secular is really interesting and to me sheds light on this. Given his secular aim, Phyrro emphasised 'astathmeta', which sounds much more like anicca to me than dukkha. How do we know or infer that astathmeta was meant to translate the latter? I'd be interested in that.
Yes, the instability is also part of anicca. Buddha, however, was using words that existed in his language rather than coining specialized terms. In that respect, there shouldn't be any problem that there's an overlap in meaning between anicca and dukkha. The overlap reinforces the point.
The translations come from the Silk Road philologist Christopher Beckwith, in his book "Greek Buddha." It's in the first chapter, which Princeton U. Press has made free online. https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10500.pdf
Here's what Beckwith says:
"The most important point here is that duḥ + stha literally means ‘dis-/ bad- + stand-’, that is, ‘badly standing, unsteady’ and is therefore virtually identical to the literal meaning of Greek astathmēta, from a- + sta- ‘not- + stand’,38 both evidently meaning ‘unstable’. This strongly suggests that Pyrrho’s middle term is in origin a simple calque."
Beckwith says "anepikrita" and "anicca" share the meaning of "unfixed." While that does seem to be true, the two words end up feeling very different. This is associated with the change in the order of the words. Pyrrho's version is sort of "Aristotle is wrong. Here's why he's wrong. Therefore, do this." Buddha's version is sort of: "Heraclitus is right. Because of that, we suffer. Therefore, the Brahmins are wrong."
You can find reviews that criticize Beckwith's account here. Beckwith tries hard to make a case that this is Pyrrho's translation of the Three Marks of Existence. My attitude is that Pyrrho came to India with some philosophical problems on his mind. He's a Democritean and likely has some affinity for Democritus' student Protagoras. Aristotle and Plato have contradicted Democritus and Protagoras. Pyrrho sees ideas in Buddhism that can address these open issues in Greek philosophy. So, I see what Pyrrho did less as translation and more as repackaging and repurposing, and in that sense, somewhat changing Buddhist ideas.
It should also be taken into consideration that Pyrrho was having to learn a foreign language while he was learning Buddhism.
I suspect that Pyrrho didn't think he needed to persuade his fellow Greeks that life entails suffering. It would seem that the Greeks already believed that. Pyrrho explicitly gives his take on the Three Marks as a recipe for eudaimonia. There's no need to say in that recipe that one starts out without eudaimonia.
I think that Pyrrho would have disagreed with the Buddha about the noble quest being the search for that which does not age, decay, and die. That would have sounded a lot like Plato's forms. It looks to me like Pyrrho chose to lean into the Heraclitian and probably Democritean view that we don't have access to such things.
BTW, I disagree with Beckwith that "apathia" got corrupted into "aphasia."
As you say, the Buddha used everyday words, and I think this supports my points. Dukkha is not a specialized philosophical term, it's the everyday word for pain, just as sukha is for pleasure. The Buddha and his disciples weren't philologists, I'm not sure to what extent etymology matters here versus actual usage.
The first noble truth says that birth, aging, sickness and death are painful (dukkha is an adjective there). I'm not sure what it would mean that "birth is unstable." Words descended from dukkha—like Hindi's dukh or Thai's kwam thuk—refer to feeling pain, suffering, sadness, distress, unhappiness, to cause grief or difficulty, etc.
If dukkha conveys instability, does sukha convey stability? A main argument against sensory pleasures (kāmasukha) is that they're fleeting, that they're anicca!
To me, that "what is anicca is dukkha" is not an emphasis or a redundancy—which would be if dukkha is just trying to say that things are unstable, the literal meaning of anicca—but the inference that, because of that, they will entail literal pain sooner or later, physical or mental. This becomes the value judgement I pointed out in my first comment. "Anicca -> dukkha" is the most concise summary of the renunciant, transcendentalist mindset.
I see Jonathan C Gold has a paper on the difficulties he had with Buddhist doctrine and how everything changed after applying Phyrro's understanding to dukkha in Buddhist texts. I still have to delve into it, but my first reaction was: well, of course "anicca -> dukkha" is challenging, it's a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure how many modern Buddhists actually agree! But the tendency has been to slightly change the claim so we don't have to admit or even realise we disagree, it seems to me.
I've heard dharma teachers make dukkha mean essentially another version of impermanence: what is impermanent is suffering; but suffering doesn't only mean suffering, it has three meaning, the first of which refers to how things are always changing. So: what is impermanent is impermanent?
I'm sorry for going on for so long, it's a topic of much interest to me! Thanks, Doug; and sorry for a very late reply.
It's a topic of great interest to me, too!
It seems to me that impermanence and instability have similarities, but they point to different things. With impermanence, the thing that is here now will not be here in the future. With instability, the thing that is here now will still be here in the future, but its position will have changed.
Beckwith's point is that in the Buddha's era, "dukkha" was not simply a word for "pain"; it was also a word for "unstable." Since then, this second meaning has fallen away. There's a paper that picks up Beckwith's idea and finds that some early texts using "dukkha" don't quite make sense when only the first meaning is applied, but they make perfect sense when the second meaning is applied.
I'll make an attempt on the meaning of "birth is unstable." In the context of weighing (measurement), "unstable" means one cannot be confident of how it will turn out. Birth fits that. We're not sure how birth, sickness, death, etc. will turn out.
I make this mistake all the time, thinking that a perfect life is within reach if I just get a final couple of ducks lined up. It looks better on paper than it actually feels.