Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, death is suffering.”
The Buddha · Buddhism · Ancient · canonical discourse; oral tradition from the 5th–4th century BCE, written down centuries later
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is the start of a diagnosis: ordinary life, in its very phases, is unsatisfactory, not only the dramatic disasters. A competing reading hears a pessimistic claim that life is not worth living, whereas the discourse pairs the diagnosis with an origin, a cessation, and a path. The lines are in Samyutta Nikaya 56.11, the first sermon, at the deer park. Suffering, dukkha, covers a range from pain to the unease of anything conditioned.
Did The Buddha really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Part of the first noble truth in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, as translated in the tradition of Bhikkhu Bodhi. The full formula also includes illness, grief, and the five aggregates. This English keeps three items from that list.
Where it comes from
Samyutta Nikaya 56.11, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta
Approximate date: canonical discourse; oral tradition from the 5th–4th century BCE, written down centuries later.
How to use it
A birthday, a parent's slowing down, a funeral in the family are not interruptions of an otherwise secure life, on this diagnosis. They are examples of the pattern. The point is not to refuse the cake or the care, and it is to stop expecting birth, ageing, and death to arrange themselves into a story without lack, and what you do with that seeing is the rest of the sermon, not this clause alone.
A mindset reading
The habit is to hear a diagnosis rather than a mood of gloom. Ask what the claim is excluding: not joy, but the idea that the phases of a life can be made permanently satisfactory. If the next truths are ignored, the sentence becomes a complaint, and in the discourse they are not the whole teaching.
Understand the philosophy
The sermon answers what the Buddha claims to have woken up to. Dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, is the first of the four noble truths. Birth, ageing, and death are instances, and the full passage adds illness and the clinging aggregates. The other truths name craving as the origin, cessation as possible, and the eightfold path as the way, and the sentence is the opening of a medical pattern, not a last word about meaning.
- meaning
- death
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is the start of a diagnosis: ordinary life, in its very phases, is unsatisfactory, not only the dramatic disasters. A competing reading hears a pessimistic claim that life is not worth living, whereas the discourse pairs the diagnosis with an origin, a cessation, and a path. The lines are in Samyutta Nikaya 56.11, the first sermon, at the deer park. Suffering, dukkha, covers a range from pain to the unease of anything conditioned.
Did The Buddha really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Part of the first noble truth in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, as translated in the tradition of Bhikkhu Bodhi. The full formula also includes illness, grief, and the five aggregates. This English keeps three items from that list.
Which work is it in?
Samyutta Nikaya 56.11, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta Approximate date: canonical discourse; oral tradition from the 5th–4th century BCE, written down centuries later.