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Everyone in the west understands Buddha’s First Noble Truth.
Long before any of us may come to study or know of eastern thought and parse the meaning of the Pali or Sanskrit translations we know the street translations.
In street parlance, the first Noble Truth is ‘Life Sucks’ or ‘Life is a Bitch’, depending on the company you are keeping. A brush with a world religions class or philosophic friends will get you to ‘Life is Suffering’.
The partial translation is ‘Life is Dukkha’; with Dukkha still being a Sanskrit word. No one argues much over the Life part, but I do believe it to be more like ‘the human condition’. Dukkha however gets much debate.
Scholars and academics, both Buddhist and otherwise, will explain that there are three basic perspectives; physical pains (body), emotional pains (mind) and existential angst (spiritual pains). Which frankly all sound like suffering to me, so it is easy to see how in the west and in English we got to Life is Suffering.
Personally, I find the literal translation most helpful. Dukkha translated literally is ‘stuck’ and more over the particular kind of stuck or sticky-ness found when a wheel isn’t freely rotating around an axle.
For a mental image, think of an old two-wheeled ox cart with wooden hubs and spoke wheels on a wooden axle…
