I should’ve been more exact. There are lots of Buddhist schools and teachers, and they disagree with each other on many things. So one shouldn’t talk about “the Buddhist sense” of any term. When I said “the Buddhist sense of the term”, I meant something like “the sense of the term that lsusr is using it in, which matches my own understanding from meditation practice as well as the (largely Theravada-influenced) teachers I’ve learned from”.
If you pressed me on an exact definition for suffering, I probably also wouldn’t spontaneously give exactly that definition (in fact, I did already mention to Said that it’s missing at least one important distinction). But at the same time, I do feel like it’s close enough to what the core of suffering in my experience is that when lsusr said it, I immediately went “yes sounds right to me”.
(Duncan Sabien would probably say that the definition that lsusr gave is a sazen—“a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts”.)
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.
I should’ve been more exact. There are lots of Buddhist schools and teachers, and they disagree with each other on many things. So one shouldn’t talk about “the Buddhist sense” of any term. When I said “the Buddhist sense of the term”, I meant something like “the sense of the term that lsusr is using it in, which matches my own understanding from meditation practice as well as the (largely Theravada-influenced) teachers I’ve learned from”.
If you pressed me on an exact definition for suffering, I probably also wouldn’t spontaneously give exactly that definition (in fact, I did already mention to Said that it’s missing at least one important distinction). But at the same time, I do feel like it’s close enough to what the core of suffering in my experience is that when lsusr said it, I immediately went “yes sounds right to me”.
(Duncan Sabien would probably say that the definition that lsusr gave is a sazen—“a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts”.)
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.