Dukkha, often translated as suffering, can be more accurately understood as unsatisfactoriness, a quality that permeates all experience. Understanding dukkha is essential to the Buddhist view, as it represents one of the three characteristics (or three marks of existence) and is the first of the four noble truths.

The Buddha categorized dukkha into three types:
1) The suffering of suffering (dukkha dukkha) is the first and most obvious kind, which includes physical and emotional discomfort and pain that everyone experiences, as well as birth, old age, sickness, and death.
2) The suffering of change (viparinama-dukkha) is the second, and includes suffering from clinging to pleasure as it changes and fades. It also includes separating from what we hold dear, encountering what is undesirable, and not getting what we want.
3) The suffering of existence (sankara-dukkha) refers to an all-pervasive quality of unsatisfactoriness that permeates our experience. This is more subtle, but can be sensed as an undercurrent of doubt or anxiety even during our happy moments. This third type of suffering arises from our five skandhas, or aggregates (form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness) which are the causes of our future skandhas, which in turn make future suffering possible.

Everyone experiences dukkha, this feeling of unsatisfactoriness, a quality that permeates all experience; by learning to recognize the various ways we experience dukkha, we learn to cultivate greater compassion for ourselves and others.

Reflect on the different ways they feel unsatisfactoriness and explore whether their feelings can be categorized by different kinds of suffering—from examples in literature to their personal experiences—to build familiarity with the three types of dukkha.

• What types of suffering are you aware of at this moment?
• What types of suffering can you recall experiencing during the last day or two?
• What does the third type feel like, and how can you recognize it?

Differentiate between the three types of dukkha by analyzing specific examples from personal experience; evaluate how recognizing unsatisfactoriness in all experience cultivates compassion for oneself and others; and demonstrate understanding of how awareness of suffering motivates the pursuit of liberation through dharma practice.